Historians of music in the United States have grappled with the European canon and its underlying critical principles for at least a generation. By historicizing the application of Western music’s intellectual tradition in the training of American professional musicians, this presentation explores the reciprocity between these principles and their perpetuation in educational settings.

New York’s Institute of Musical Art (today’s Juilliard School, founded in 1905) stands as a case study in the combined effects of educational content and institutional vision. At the institute, knowledgeable faculty members taught “laws” of music history, theory, and composition that can be traced to 19th century-German conservatories. At the same time, the founding director, Breslau-born Frank Damrosch, established a top-down governance structure focused on faculty and student compliance with, and dedication to, “true” principles of art and their perpetuation in American society via performance and, especially, teaching.

From its inception, the institute’s program marginalized modernism even as important modernist styles were newly under formation. As innovative popular music thrived in New York by the 1920s, the program rendered it effectively non-existent within the institute’s walls. And finally, the institute’s ethos encouraged internalization and mechanical imitation of a closed tradition at the expense of opportunities for, and consideration of, musical and intellectual change.

Founded in 1798 under the auspices of the Leipzig-based music publishing firm of Breitkopf und Härtel, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung printed articles on an array of musical topics: reviews of new music, analytical essays, biographies of important composers (both contemporary and past), and reports on musical activity from local correspondents in cities across Europe. The AmZ is thus a significant source of information on reception history, and given the extent of its coverage, was in a position to shape the development (and therefore, the history) of music in Europe. Its editor, the Leipzig-born and -educated Friedrich Rochlitz, commissioned these reports and reviews from people he knew. But in the case of Vienna, some of these correspondents were not native Viennese, but outsiders from other parts of Germany. Thus the "official" story of what was important in Vienna — composers, works, and especially, genres of music — was shaped to a considerable degree by a North German viewpoint that differed at times from that of the Viennese themselves.

This paper will examine specific cases in which North German views, and in particular those of the Saxon diplomat Georg August Griesinger, shaped the emerging Viennese classical canon as reported in the journal’s first half-decade, from 1798 to 1803.

When Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, his unpaid secretary Anton Schindler (1795-1864) took from the estate letters and documents — including surviving conversation books in which acquaintances had written their sides of conversations with the deaf composer — that might prove useful to his later role as biographer. In January 1846, he sold the conversation books to the Prussian Royal Library, today’s Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, where later biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer also used them extensively. Even then, there was a suspicion that Schindler, always an irritating character in any account of Beethoven’s final years, had actually destroyed hundreds of the conversation books. After several earlier scholars had failed, a Berlin-Vienna team headed by Karl-Heinz Köhler and Grita Herre published an 11-volume state-of-the-art transcription and edition of the 139 surviving Konversationshefte from 1968 to 2001. In 1977, however, Peter Stadlen shocked the musicological world by his discovery that many of Schindler’s entries were, in fact, written only after Beethoven had died, seemingly to make his own role in the composer’s life appear more important and his transmission of the master’s ideas more authentic. Scholars could now feel justified in speaking in the most extravagant terms of Schindler’s arrogance, suspiciousness, dishonesty, and even criminality. Few figures in music history have been so reviled and with such scholarly delight as Anton Schindler for the past quarter century. A more dispassionate view of Schindler’s falsified entries, however, must take into account the fact that, however inappropriate it seems to us today, he acted before the birth of modern documentary musicology, and even before the spread of objective general history as pioneered by his contemporary Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). While many of Schindler’s later "falsified" entries do, in fact, support the charges that his detractors have leveled against him, still others among them provide compelling and probably accurate glimpses of Beethoven’s life, his thoughts, and his relations with his contemporaries that posterity might not otherwise have possessed.

Nikolaus Bacht (King’s College, Cambridge), The intellectual history of listening.

The purpose of this paper is to chart the intellectual history of listening, a subfield still considered peripheral within the larger field of music’s intellectual history. The main section of the paper will reveal curious nonparallels with the discourse on seeing. While visual perception has been a major interest at least since Leonardo da Vinci, descriptions of listening experience remained thin until the late eighteenth century. Once it had taken off, however, research into the historicity of the ear was soon silenced by cognitive scientists, whose quest for universal cognitive laws of listening was — and still is — based on the assumption, counterintuitive for most historical-minded thinkers, that aural perception of music does not change in the course of history. This intellectual-historical and comparative disciplinary investigation will lead into a conclusion about why the historical discourse on listening had founders, but hardly any followers and certainly no fads. More specifically, the conclusion will show how a listening-centered approach might help explain why there is still no parity between musicology and art history, and suggest ways to enhance our profile within the disciplinary structures that continue to regulate our research and make music’s intellectual history.

The history of music historiography presents an intriguing topic which this paper will explore. In the 19th century and continuing into the early 20th century, European music historians claimed to embrace a universalistic historical perspective. In reality, however, this universality gradually became more narrow by a forceful interaction between the appreciation of European music and the corresponding development of a highly Euro-centric interpretation of music history still masked under the guise of universality. The Euro-centric view, rarely explicitly revealed, was based on the premise that important and influential principles of musical composition and performance evolved only in Europe, especially in Italy, France and Germany. This paper shows that ironically, despite the continuously broadening range of historical information available, the history of music historiography, up to the early 20th century, is a history of gradual limitation and narrowing of perspectives, eventually resulting in the development of a concept of music historiography shaped by the ideology of supremacy.

André Balog (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, New York), "…those unheard are sweeter…"? The unwritten history of Hungarian music and musicians in the 20th century — An outline of a history.

Hungary is often singled out for having produced an astonishing number of musicians, considering its relatively small population. Yet, the number of well-known Hungarian musicians — even in the 20th century, when a somewhat democratic selection of talent might have been expected — did not come about in a way that was anything close to fair. Between the two world wars, a series of anti-Jewish racial laws first reduced the number of Jewish students admissible to higher education to a minuscule quota, later banned Jewish performers from the stage altogether, and ultimately set out to exterminate all Hungarians defined as "Jews". It is difficult to estimate the number of those who were prevented from pursuing a career in music by the discriminatory regulations of the interwar period, and there is no telling how many musicians perished in the Holocaust. After World War II, the speedily imposed communist regime, which turned the country into a satellite of Stalinist Russia, introduced novel methods of discrimination. People were now evaluated on the basis of their “class origin”, perceived past political activities and allegiances, or the measure of their putative Marxist convictions. In addition, these criteria were applied in a haphazard fashion, and untold numbers of those singled out for persecution simply fell victim to randomly applied state-controlled terror. Both the cryptofascist regime of 1920-45 and the communist dictatorship of 1948-89 were eager to impose complete control over the arts. Their tastes ran the gamut from staunchly conservative to outright reactionary, and both systems were self-admitted enemies of the avant-garde. Freedom of expression was strictly censured — in fact nonexistent — throughout the tenures of both antidemocratic regimes. Thus, the celebrated flowering of Hungarian music in fact came about in the face of cultural oppression throughout most of the 20th century.

In lieu of a comprehensive history of the "unheard melodies" of Hungarian music in the 20th century — muted by two successive totalitarian regimes — we endeavor to outline the dimensions of the loss, and indicate the music that might have been. Three case studies are presented to demonstrate the fate of Hungarian musicians of the era: László Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, and László Lajtha.

The discourses enveloping György Ligeti in the first 30 years of his emigration from Hungary in 1956 focused on questions of interest to Darmstadt composers: Serialism, historical progress and social consciousness. Triggered by a new interest in Cold War studies, a new phase of Ligeti reception opened in 1985 when the question was posed as to how much his early work had been tarnished by the communist regime. If the first approach ignored his roots, the second viewed them through the edifice of Cold War propaganda.

My paper reads Ligeti’s own interviews, essays and (partly unpublished, archived) letters from the post-1956 period in terms of the light they shed on his individual relationship to the past. Exploring the ways he used fiction, childhood dreams or actual events and places when he thought back, I address his discourse as a personal, nostalgic, form of history.

During the last Bourbon’s reign, ecclesiastical France lived in a state of constant tension in relation to the Roman magisterium: Political but also spiritual stakes were rising. At the same time, liturgical studies — and particularly those dedicated to plainsong — were going through a period of huge development. Motivated by Tridentinism and the need to come up to new expectations (notably those of Nouveaux Convertis), scholars were busily engaged not so much to explain as to justify liturgical and sacramental practices. But if thorough documentation and an application of Saint-Maur’s methodology were approximating to secular historiography, ecclesiastical presuppositions conditioned these authors’ purposes, expressing contradictory currents in the French Church. Among these researches, discourse on the origins and development of Gregorian-Frankish plainsong was developing along similar lines. Charlemagne was represented variously as obedient or dominating in relation to Pope Adrian, Gallican chant as either very different from or totally identical to Gregorian, diocesan plainsong as a product either of a venerable antiquity or of a reprehensible decadence. However, mediaeval musicology, as a Roman or as a Gallican apologetic, was to emerge from this context, building progressively through phases of truce between the contending sides. This communication proposes to evoke this process by analysing a selection of texts, from Nivers’s Dissertation sur le chant grégorien (1683) to Lebeuf’s Traité sur le chant ecclésiastique (1741): Beyond an epistemological journey, it will reveal a new way of approaching French ecclesiastical history.

Zdravko Blažeković (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, New York), Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834-1911) among the founders of ethno/musicology.

In a Zagreb bookstore in 1886, Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834-1911) noticed the first issue of Guido Adler’s Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. As soon as he read Adler’s “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft”, he sent a letter to the editor of the weekly magazine Vienac describing how astounded he was in reading Adler’s definition and classification of musicology: “One can understand that musicology — which I founded — is a recognized science, and that the Germans even adopted for this discipline the term ‘musicology’, which I gave to it.” (F.Ks. Kuhač, “Muzikologija”, Vienac 35, 1886) Indeed, in his 1882 essay “Die Eigenthümlichkeiten der magyarischen Volksmusik”, Kuhač did use and explain the term “musicology”. Since the Vierteljahrsschrift, with the definition of the term, had appeared four years later, he assumed — and he died with this conviction — that he was the first to have coined it. Regardless of whether or not he was the first to use the term, it is to Kuhač’s credit that he defined musicology with thinking independently about the discipline of music scholarship at the same time that Spitta, Chrysandler, and Adler were considering the scope of the discipline. Comparative musicology was, for Kuhač, a discipline which had the task of investigating the dominant stylistic characteristics of the music of any given nation. Kuhač saw the point of the discipline to be that of establishing the laws of any national music, which could then be used as the basis for a national style in art music. His far-reaching goal was to create an awareness of Croatian national music, and to establish its place in the context of Central European culture. From this starting point, he developed a program for a survey of the national music of South Slavs based on his systematization of comparative musicology (Versuch einer Musikgeschichte der Südslaven, 1875). On a large scale, the elements of the discipline comprise the collecting of traditional songs and dances; the analysis of their melodies, rhythms, and forms; their philological analysis (since — as he pointed out — the language and music of every nation constitute an organic union); and, finally, their comparison with music traditions of the neighboring regions. The auxiliary sciences for this analysis are organology, paleography, histories of literature and liturgy, acoustics, historiography (including biographies of composers, musicians, and music scholars, and histories of music associations, institutes, and performing arts organizations), and oral history concerning music. In musicological literature, Kuhač is most famous for his collection Južno-slovjenske narodne popievke (South-Slav folk songs, 1878-81), but in an effort to produce a universal survey of music culture among the South Slavs, his interests were unlimited, embracing ancient music notation, organology, music histories of Central European nations, music terminology, linguistics, and acoustics. Although some of his research methods seem inappropriate today, and some of his arguments are too colored by 19th-century nationalism, his work deserves a re-evaluation in the context of the music scholarship of his time, and the scope, method, and aim of musicology as he designed it should be compared with the theories put forward by other music scholars of the second half of the 19th century.

Olivia A. Bloechl (University of California at Los Angeles), Hearing the sauvage in early modern music.

If we take seriously the axiom of postcolonial theory, that colonialism leaves its marks on the cultures of colonizers as well as colonized, it should not be possible to hear early modern French, Spanish, or English music without recalling that in the same period these nations were engaged in processes of protocolonial self-fashioning. Reorienting our hearing toward traces of these processes involves moving beyond the important work of identifying exoticism in Renaissance and Baroque repertories, toward considering the role of a potent signifier — the musicking Indian body — in the production of meaning around basic categories of early modern music. I focus here on the French category of sauvagerie, developed partly out of musical encounters with indigenous North and South Americans. These encounters were produced in the literatures of travel, utopia, and extraordinary voyages; music theoretical and philosophical writings; and ballet, theater, and opera. Whereas music has commonly been regarded as incidental to the machinations of French protocolonialism (and proto-colonialism as incidental to French music), I propose that figurations of musical sauvagerie occasioned the consolidation of French bon goût and civilité in the realm of music and, by extension, in relation to broader questions of identity. As in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, "les sauvages" were sometimes animated as characters or characteristic sounds. However, learning to hear the sauvage in early modern music also involves recognizing the ordinary displacement of sauvagerie in, for example, the tonal and rhythmic orderliness of a Lullian recitative or the formal clarity of a Couperin dance movement. This critical strategy disrupts the musicological tendency to take aesthetic and formal categories of the French Baroque at face value, by sensitizing us to these as processes by which French Musique began to be identified against the musical embodiment of a colonial otherness.

Mathias Boström (Department of Musicology, Uppsala University/Swedish Centre for Folk Music and Jazz Research, Stockholm), Infotainment: A dark side of the history of early ethnomusicology?

Results of ethnomusicological research are today often communicated in a variety of forms and media (books, sound recordings, online presentations, exhibits, lectures) for varying audiences (the studied community, the scholarly community, and the interested public). This breadth can be seen as a consequence of social and historical changes in the traditional music cultures ethnomusicologists in general have studied, as well as in the scholars’ own communities. That there has been change in the practice and presentation of ethnomusicology is also reflected in the historiography of the discipline, with recent examples in the new editions of the MGG and The new Grove. Early 20th-century ethnomusicology is generally described as an archival armchair exercise, a view often reflected in contemporaneous writings as well. But many collectors of early ethnomusicological data had other intentions than research, and scholars often had close connections to museums, for example, and a need to communicate their results to a wider audience for public acceptance and future funding. Considering the renewed interest in early field recordings, in combination with the same historiography, it is time to take a closer look at the communicative practices outside the scholarly spheres — what we can call infotainment — of early ethnomusicology.

Bella Brover-Lubovsky (School of Music, University of Illinois), Estro armonico: "Harmony" and the paradox of historical recognition.

Antonio Vivaldi is nowadays considered the most prominent and influential Italian composer of his generation. The decisive impact that his work had on the 18th-century European music has been pointed out by scholars starting from the turn of the 20th century (Torchi, Schering, Schmitz, and LaLaurencie) and until today. However, an exploration of the laconic posthumous reception history of Vivaldi’s music in the 18th and early 19th centuries reveals an abrupt disappearance of his name and works from the musical-intellectual scene and displays outright national-cultural differences. It combines the poignant oblivion to which he was relegated in Venice and other Italian centers (only scattered reports, by Goldoni, Gianelli and Caffi, exist in Italian literature of the period) and the castigation of his deficient harmonic practices that became common in writings by British men of letters (North, Hawkins, Avison, and Burney). In contrast, German musicians (J.S. Bach, Pisendel, Heinichen, Mattheson, Scheibe, Quantz, Riepel, Hiller, Gerber, and Koch) demonstrated the all-embracing adoption of his style and singled out Vivaldi’s harmonic idiom as a model worthy of imitation.

Discovering the reasons why Vivaldi was misunderstood by his younger contemporaries and examining the nature of national distinctions reveals that it was precisely the harmonic idiom and the arrangement of tonal space in his music that were responsible for his dual reception and historical recognition. The concept of "harmony", the key definition in Vivaldi’s criticism, differs entirely in English, German, and Italian literature, and mirrors controversial aesthetic judgments and cultural orientations.

I argue that reassessment of the reception history of Vivaldi’s music emphasizes a cultural phenomenon of a much broader scope. It underscores prominent aspects of music historiography in the age of Enlightenment and sheds light on the diffusion of artistic ideas in 18th-century Western culture.

In this paper I will examine the original context of two editions of Bach’s complete works undertaken in the 19th century: one, begun in 1801, published by Hoffmeister & Kühnel and overseen by Johann Nikolaus Forkel; and a second, produced at mid-century under the auspices of the Bach-Gesellschaft of Leipzig. Though similar in scope and arising from related impulses, each project is reflective of a distinct moment in German political and intellectual history. The Hoffmeister & Kühnel Gesamtausgabe, like Forkel’s seminal biography of Bach, was initiated during the Napoleonic Wars, when German cultural nationalism was actively cultivated by many leading intellectuals. Indeed the edition and the biography, both of which had strong patriotic overtones, conveyed a clear shift away from the cosmopolitan spirit of Forkel’s earlier music-historical scholarship. The Bach-Gesellschaft was founded in 1850 by prominent members of the German music intelligentsia with the sole purpose of making available Bach’s complete works "in the name of serious and faithful research". Significantly, the society came into existence in the wake of the revolutions of 1848-49, when German liberalism was politically challenged by the recent course of events, but its values — secular education, modern scientific advancements, artistic culture — were nonetheless central to the consolidation of bourgeois culture.

This paper will assess each of these "monuments" to Bach as a cultural text. I will consider the ways in which each effort to produce a complete works edition was situated against the backdrop of the Bach revival, relied upon the German nationalist discourse, and shed light on the relationship between historical knowledge and social class in 19th-century Germany. Ultimately, I hope to illustrate how, in a century characterized by historical consciousness, the entextualization and transmission of "Bach" functioned as a form of commemorative practice in German musical culture.

The paper provides an overview of musicology’s approach to early polyphony. The field was created by the great German scholar Friedrich Ludwig, who transcribed and catalogued all medieval polyphony. In fact, he did it so well that subsequent generations of scholars have questioned almost none of his conclusions and reasoning, believing that he was doing a strict presuppositionless Wissenschaft. A detailed reading of his publications shows that he was full of prejudices of the evolutionary progressive kind. He judged medieval polyphony by comparing it to his favorite composer Palestrina, arrived at a chronology on the basis of Palestrina’s style, applied criteria from the 19th-century autonomous art work in trying to attribute compositions to composers and establishing which version of a piece was first. Moreover, his work is full of blind spots, failing to ask some fundamental questions. He did not address the issue that medieval composers constantly reuse the same material, and he had little interest in music theory and culture of the period. However, Ludwig’s hold over the discipline remains to this day so strong that subsequent scholars preferred to refine his questions rather than seeing that many of his presuppositions were wrong-headed.

The foundation of musicology in France: Pierre Aubry’s adoption of methods of positivist historians (1890-1910)

In a series of lecture courses he gave at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1899-1900, Pierre Aubry suggested that the history of medieval music in France – beyond general musicology – ought to be brought into alignment with the critical methods of historians. This project, in which he himself took part, presupposed the adoption of the principle of collective research (with common objectives and a common language, room for criticism, team spirit, etc.), endowed with new intellectual tools, and the integration of the scientific community under the banner of what would be characterized as, faute de mieux, positivism. At the new Sorbonne (the institutional umbrella under which the Third Republic gathered its professors), Aubry dreamed of establishing a department devoted to music history.

The aim of the paper is to examine Aubry’s method: (1) How much did he know about the activities of German historians or musicologists? (2) How did he translate exogenous procedures for his discipline? (3) What were the limits of this kind of transfer of intellectual processes? (4) How did Aubry’s colleagues receive his endeavor? (5) Did these suggestions result in a like response on behalf of historians? Aubry’s case raises more general questions – well beyond its specificity for the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries – regarding the methodology interdisciplinary dialogue until our very day. It may also provide an occasion for experimentally envisioning a history of music history that would pay more attention to the theories and conclusions of history rather than to what historians were doing while writing history.

Ivano Cavallini (Facoltà di scienze della formazione, Università di Palermo), The rise of music historiography in the nineteenth century Italy between positivism and evolutionism.

During the second half of the nineteenth century Italy developed scholarly research in musicology under the influence of musical studies in Germany and France. At the same time, modern music historiography separated from philosophy (established by Ranke, Michelet, Burckardt and other historians) and as a branch of musicological discipline developed its own methodology. Furthermore, following the model of the national studies in literature, the mainstream of music historiography was investigating all kinds of music, as is demonstrated in the opening article of Rivista musicale italiana (1894). In fact, the aim of the new discipline was to investigate, collect, and classify different types of music in order to reconstruct music history after it was absent in the field of music culture for half a century.

The paper provides a survey on this topic, in particular the methods of the eminent musicologists Luigi Torchi and Oscar Chilesotti, who refused the romantic aesthetics in music research and replaced it with a positivistic point of view. For them, the most important questions was how and not why the composers created their works. As a consequence these scholars were interested in the ‘structure’ of music and their judgement was based on the analysis of style.

In Torchi’s monograph on Wagner (1890) this approach is associated with the concept of similarity and sequence, as is demonstrated in August Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1842). In Chilesotti’s writings this historical pattern is demonstrated with Spencer’s theory of evolution. Chilesotti’s book L’evoluzione nella musica: Appunti sulla teoria di H. Spencer (1898) describes the sixteenth-century music trend as a series of transformations from the ‘simple’ to the ‘complex’. This is the case of the popular songs played on the lute, at first transposed into polyphony and then recreated as recitativo in the operatic language at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This curious interpretation belongs to the process of evolution in theory via the art of lutenists, i.e. the lute tablatures explain the passage from the modal system to the tonality (Saggio sulla melodia popolare, 1889). A similar methodological impulse appears in the article ‘Una canzone popolare del Cinquecento “Male per me tanta beltà mirai” ’ (Rivista musicale italiana, 1915), which analyses three different stages of a popular song: a simple three-voices ‘napolitana’ (G. Zappasorgo), a more complicated polyphonic piece for five voices (G. Ferretti), a monody which follows the tonal criteria (J.-B. Besard).

Anna Harwell Celenza (Michigan State University, East Lansing), Using Hans Christian Andersen as a window on music history.

Hans Christian Andersen was the most prominent Danish author of the nineteenth century. Now known primarily for his fairy tales, during his lifetime he was equally famous for his novels, travelogues, poetry, and stage works, and it was through these genres that he most often reflected on the world around him. With the arrival of the bicentennial of Andersen’s birth (2005), there is much about the writer that is not yet common knowledge. This paper explores a single aspect of that void — his interest in and relationship to the music culture of nineteenth-century Europe.

Why look to Andersen for information about music? To begin, Andersen had a musical background. He enjoyed a brief career as an opera singer and dancer at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, and in later years he went on to produce opera libretti for the Danish and German stage. Andersen was also an avid music devotee. He made thirty major European tours during his seventy years, and on each of these trips he regularly attended opera and concert performances, recording his impressions in a series of travel diaries. In short, Andersen was a well-informed listener, and as this paper reveals, his reflections on the music of his age serve as valuable sources for the study of music reception in the nineteenth century.

Over the course of his life, Andersen embraced and then later rejected performers such as Maria Malibran, Franz Liszt, and Ole Bull, and his interest in opera and instrumental music underwent a series of dramatic transformations. In his final years, Andersen promoted figures as disparate as Wagner and Mendelssohn, while strongly objecting to Brahms. Although such changes in taste might be interpreted as indiscriminate by modern-day readers, such shifts in opinion were not contradictory, but rather quite logical given the social and cultural climate of the age.

Ilias Chrissochoidis (Stanford University), Handel’s reception and the rise of music historiography.

Georg Friedrich Händel was the first composer to receive extensive and continuous historiographical attention. The earliest accounts of his life appear in John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the life of the late George Frederic Handel (1760), John Hawkins’ A general history of the science and practice of music (1776), and Charles Burney’s An account of the musical performances — in commemoration of Handel (1785).

Turning things around, these inaugural specimens of music historiography in Britain were specifically written to celebrate Händel’s life and achievements. Mainwaring’s biography was a commemorative volume, which also served the publicity needs of the Covent Garden oratorio series after the composer’s death. Hawkins’s History mounted a conscious defense of a music tradition whose culmination was Händel. And the Account of Burney presented a sanitized view of the 1784 Händel Festival as the musical apotheosis of the century.

Händel thus was more than the subject of these narratives; he was a motivating factor for the rise of British music historiography. The present paper examines his posthumous image as recorded and manipulated in these early historical accounts. My aim is twofold: to probe them as instruments of Händel’s canonization; and to examine their positioning of Händel’s life as an archetype of trial and triumph reflecting aspects of British identity. To give an example, Händel’s dissociation from Italian opera evokes the dissociation of England from the grasp of Rome centuries earlier. The emergence of music historiography can be seen, therefore, as part of Händel’s reception in 18th-century Britain.

The influence of philology in the context of the 19th-century creation of national traditions resulted in a conception of music as written text, and an intimate relationship between music and word, that has characterized musicology ever since (and perhaps music too, in traditions that range from late 19th-century ‘narrative’ music to 20th-century ‘campus’ composition). Broad cultural developments associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism placed a new emphasis on reception, in other words on performed rather than inherent meaning, but the reflection of these developments in the ‘new’ musicology of the 1990s was curiously skewed: largely as a result of its embrace of Adorno, it retained the traditional conception of music as written text. The contrast between Adorno and post-Adornian sociologies of meaning can stand for the distinction between a musicology centred on written texts (whether understood in terms of national spirit, great men, or autonomous works of art) and one that takes seriously the idea of music as a performing art, and so takes as its primary subject the study of performances and their reception. That of course entails the study of recordings, which are at the same time specifically musical ‘texts’ (commodities at the intersection of music and material culture) and historical documents as subject to critical interpretation as any other. Just as writing about music impacts upon performance style (as illustrated for instance by the changing image of Webern), so performance style impacts upon writing about music, bringing about the prospect of a ‘history of music’ predicated not on compositional innovation but on performance and reception — on music, in short, as experienced in everyday life.

After nearly half a century of economic migration from Poland’s Tatra Mountain region to the urban prairie of Chicago, Górale (Polish highlander) immigrants organized as a distinct ethnic group in the 1920s. The move was at once regional, national, and global as the diaspora community coalesced around music-cultural performances integral to producing and maintaining a sense of group identity that had only recently been codified. Performing identity with distinctive music/sonic practices, dance, clothing styles, and linguistic cues, a few well-documented musicians were instrumental in linking groups in Chicago, New York, and Toronto with villages in southern Poland commonly described as “isolated”. The result is a complex negotiation of “separateness” and “connection” across and within numerous social, political and ideological fronts.

This paper considers the historical and intellectual structures required in the formation of a diasporic social identity in a nation-state of immigrants. Why would a group of men and women from Poland living in Chicago choose to recognize themselves as a village group rather than align with the larger Polish immigrant community in that city? What sort of ideological infrastructure was necessary to make such an identification both possible and desirable? I suggest that part of this infrastructure was provided by musical folklore in Poland from the last half of the 19th century up through the 1920s by showing how the creation of a musically articulated identity was integral in creating the ethnicity “Górale” in the first place.

James R. Cowdery (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, New York), Kategorie or Wertidee? The early years of the IFMC.

Founded in the aftermath of World War II, the International Folk Music Council was a diverse group of scholars, musicians, and enthusiasts, united toward an urgent goal: the preservation and revival of the world’s rapidly disappearing musical traditions. But beyond this general common cause, its members differed widely on many topics--not least, on the very definition of "folk music". Beginning with the IFMC’s first conference in 1948, where Walter Wiora discussed the distinction between Kategorie and Wertidee, several of the Council’s members--including Arthur Morris Jones, Maud Karpeles, and Albert Marinus--debated the proper application of such terms as "folk" and "authentic". While the Council eventually managed to settle on official definitions, the questions that were raised illuminate the beginnings of ethnomusicology and resonate with some of the current controversies in the field.

Joel Crotty (Monash University, Melbourne), Music, socialist realism and the Romanian experience, 1948-1956: (Re)interpreting music history in light of (re)reading, (re)listening and (re)writing for a different audience.

After the communists had gained control of Romania in early 1948 they quickly set about implementing the Stalinist agenda of a centrally planned, state-owned economy and the complete reordering of intellectual and artistic life so as to be ideologically subordinate to the political sphere. The new Romanian political elite adopted without question the Soviet ideal of socialist realism as the way to bring artists into line and as a way to use their skills for propaganda purposes. But as Geoffrey Hosking suggests: ‘The official [Soviet Socialist Realist] doctrine was essentially non-committal, a more or less empty shell whose content was to be provided by the writers themselves. Socialist Realism may have been imposed by politicians, but it was created by writers’. So what did composers create in the early days of the Romanian People’s Republic? How was this explained in Muzica, the official organ of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists? How do we view such material today in a world no longer divided along communist and noncommunist lines? If history is the ‘texted past’ then in what ways can we (re)text Romania’s music-communist past? Alternatively, can, or more to the point, should we move beyond the Cold War rhetoric of socialist realist composition being nothing more than a ‘thoroughly conventional imitation of the music of the good old bourgeois days’? (Paul Henry Lang) These questions act not only as the points of synergy but also as points of departure in (re)turning to Romania’s recent musical climate.

James Robert Currie (State University of New York at Buffalo), The context of freedom and the antinomies of the new musicology.

The new musicology views itself as unmasking both music’s social truths and the political agendas of musicology that seek to repress such truths. It appears to be about liberation, which it formulates in postmodern terms. This paper assess such claims through a political critique of the postmodern philosophical foundations of new musicology’s central hermeneutic concept: context.

Postmodernism is critical of Enlightened "meta-narratives": those "horizons of universalization" (autonomy, reason, and so on) that are ideologically imposed, control the world through totalizing forms of interpretation, and marginalize and eradicate differences (Lyotard). Postmodernism validates interpretation in terms of contexts, since they historically and geographically localize claims, creating a pluralistic terrain of knowledge, which the pragmatist philosopher Rorty views as radically democratic. Zizek argues that this is philosophically inconsistent: merely a rhetorical replacing of one a priori (Enlightened universalism) with that of another, postmodern relativism. Moreover, since localized contexts can also be oppressive, postmodern philosophers such as Deleuze have to script resistance as an endless slippage between contexts, transforming the subject into a euphoric cultural schizophrenic. But to know how and when to slip, we have to invoke the questions of agency, and to legitimize agency we have to invoke the Enlightened autonomous subject — which postmodernism exiles as its first move in creating a "consistent" theory of democratic plurality.

We must remain politically critical of new musicology’s claim that liberation occurs through context. For while context helps reveal things about music that the discipline had previously censored, if the same postmodern theory were applied to us, it would amount to an enforced relinquishment of a key constituent of our agency as political beings. The question is thus: is it the case, as most new musicology insists, that the politics of our hermeneutics of music should be the same for our hermeneutics of each other?

Elise Polko (1822-1899) is a figure who has been written out of music history despite her important contributions as a Musikschriftstellerin. She published over 90 literary works, including the collection of short stories, the Musikalische Märchen, Phantasien und Skizzen (1852), which is a set of 24 individual narratives of German composers. Though the first volume experienced 25 editions, the second 15, the work is all but forgotten today, since until recently musicology had little use for fictional writing that did not present verifiable facts. However, Polko’s biographical short stories about musicians blur the lines between fact and fiction and position her in a role not unlike that of a cultural historian. Caught as she was in a literary establishment that excluded women from the role of critic, she uses the stories as means of both recording experienced music history and creating utopian worlds in which injustices to musicians are redressed. Even though Polko’s accounts were ostensibly fictional — the short story was a literary genre “suited” for women writers — she nevertheless based the stories upon biographical “fact”. This is particularly valuable for living composers like Mendelssohn, whom she personally know and, for example, whose collaborative work with his sister Fanny she exposed for the first time in the story “Versunkene Sterne” from the 1852 collection. Polko then interpreted the musical history of these composers according to her purposes, which coincided with the needs of the emerging German nation. Indeed, after the failed revolutions of 1848/49, Germans sought to instill national identity through the identification and promotion of a unifying German culture (Mommsen). In this environment, Polko’s utopian stories of success enabled musicians to serve as role models for the German Volk, whereby she made a significant contribution to German cultural politics of the Gründerzeit.

Ruth DeFord (Hunter College, The City University of New York), Sebald Heyden (1499-1561): The first historical musicologist?

In the second quarter of the 16th century, Nuremberg was the home of Germany’s most important music publishers and the epicenter of the so-called "German Josquin Renaissance". The music of Josquin and his contemporaries formed the core of the repertoire taught in schools, sung by amateur singing societies, and included in the published anthologies that served those markets. As a music theorist and rector of one of the city’s principal schools, Sebald Heyden was confronted, perhaps for the first time in the history of music, with urgent problems of what would today be called "historical performance practice" relating to this repertoire. Although the music at issue was only 40-50 years old, its mensuration and proportion signs were already obsolete and no longer understood. Heyden approached the task of recovering the meanings of those signs from the perspective of a historian. By reading old treatises, studying old music in a local private collection, and analyzing his observations with abstract reasoning, he created a theory that enabled singers to produce what he believed to be authentic performances of music of the past. Some of the assumptions underlying his research, though surely incorrect, have been remarkably persistent in 19th- and 20th-century studies of the same issues. He complains about the "corrupt" practices of modern performers and postulates a mythical past in which every sign had a single, unambiguous meaning and all composers used signs "correctly". He appeals to the "composer’s intentions" to justify the modernization of older notation in his musical examples. Although he has read conflicting opinions on his topic, he feels free to declare some authorities right and others wrong in order to draw clear and consistent conclusions about problematic issues. Heyden’s influence on later scholars has been incalculable. His reinforcement of more recent prejudices and provision of simple answers to complex questions have contributed to the lasting appeal of his ideas.

Marco Di Pasquale (Conservatorio di Vicenza), The music of the Italian Renaissance as a national myth.

In the Italian musical historiography of the 19th century the concept of Renaissance passed through several elaborative steps. This slow and long-lasting process was deeply influenced by the ideological positions connected to the developing political conditions of the country and by changing attitudes in history writing.

The historians concerned with the civil life, the figurative arts and the literature described the Renaissance as a typical Italian phenomenon, began in the early fourteenth century and lasted two hundred years, but the historians of music were unable to detect a corresponding display in music during that period, mainly because of the preminence the Flemish music and musicians were given in Italy. This led to recognize the characteristics of the Renaissance in the later music of Palestrina, particularly in the Missa Papae Marcelli. That composition was thought responsible for introducing the modern tonal system which discarded the medieval counterpoint and for stating a genuine national aesthetical principle, that of the melody, better realized in singing. This vision was delivered by Girolamo Biaggi (1856), who beneficiated from Giuseppe Baini’s famous study on Palestrina’s life and works. Anyway this vision is exclusively concerned with sacred music, as every secular genre — the madrigal, for instance — was considered the result of the Flemish occupation.

In the second half of the 19th century Oscar Chilesotti contributed to a more extented definition of the Italian musical Renaissance. Many of his studies are devoted the so-called “melodia popolare”, which in his opinion was the spontaneous manifestation of the Italian folk emerging mainly from the practice of solo singing on the lute. The “melodia popolare” enabled Chilesotti to antedate the beginning of the musical Renaissance and to define it as an event pertaining the secular real of music. In the late 15th century the “melodia popolare” emerged with the Flemish compositive technique and originated the typical Italian genres of the frottola and villanella which through the madrigal developed in the 17th-century opera.

By the end of the century the more up-to-date image of the Renaissance was offered by Alfredo Untersteiner, an amateur musicologist who was plently conscious of the contemporary musicological literature especially in German. His Renaissance had a first start in the Italian ars nova, a short artistic experience that deeply influenced the Flemish composers to begin from Dufay, and underwent a continuous technical refinement till Willaert. This composer gave up the artifices of the Flemish school and adopted the typical Italian style.

Gorana Doliner (Odsjek za Povijest Hrvatske Glazbe, Hrvatska Akademija Znanosti i Umjetnosti, Zagreb), Does folk music have its own history? The experiences gained from studying 19th-century Croatian music historiography.

Nineteenth-century writings about Croatian music history provide a valuable material for an inquiry whether or not folk music has its own history, not only furnishing clues about how the issue was understood by 19th-century writers but also offering implications for the future. The paper will discuss issues of the historiography of folk music and its terminology, surveyed on the basis of 19th-century writings by Croatian authors.

Ernesto Donas (PhD Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center), World music and its marginal Others: Music, thought and history in the case of Fernando Cabrera’s City of Money.

Discussions about the meaning of world music and the myriad of challenges that it presents have involved different fields, from radio broadcasting to popular music studies and the field of ethnomusicology proper. Institutional practices and the complexities and modes of representation, commodification and mediation within a new, larger “global” scenario have been the main issues of those discussions. Much of what has been written about world music has raised questions about complex appropriation processes, neo-colonial relations, and the aesthetics of globalization. Nevertheless, most discussions are centered on the musics that are included in the world music category. Little has been proposed about the relation to the geographies of knowledge about world music and why and how certain musics and musicians remain at the margins of this phenomenon. I seek to problematize world music in relation to the actual geographies of music, i.e., the unevenness of musical interculturality and its economic implications in the wider “global” scenario. For this purpose, I will not take Uruguayan singer-songwriter Fernando Cabrera’s song Ciudad de la Plata (City of Money) as a representation of the totality of musics and discourses marginalized or even excluded. I will instead explore the song as a site where text, music, mode of production, place of narration, broader contexts and their interrelations can synthesize and eventually unveil aesthetic issues, and engage musicians and scholars in a theoretical dialogue. By analizing music and musicians as marginal forms of intellectual thought, I will explore how the construction of alternative visions and strategies are obscured by the uneven circulation of music and the geographies of knowledge that have developed around world music.

Founded in 1920 at the initiative of the musicologist Henry Prunières (1886-1942), La Revue musicale had an objective to support the profound transformations undergone by music during this time. Prunières headed up this so-called “international” journal until 1940, aided by André Cœuroy, Managing Editor. Cœuroy was followed by Robert Bernard who both assisted Prunières as Editor-in-Chief and also worked as Managing Editor until the war; Bernard would then become sole chief of the journal by the end of the 1940s. La Revue musicale published numerous articles on aesthetic questions, on repertoire and on performance, as well as musical supplements, special editions, and several chronicles that paint an exceptional portait of musical activity in France and abroad, the journal having collaborators spread across Europe and America. Music critics (Vuillermoz, Schloezer), musicologists (Dufourcq, Dumesnil, Machabey, Pincherle), composers (Auric, Samazeuilh, Koechlin, Milhaud, Honegger, Tansman, Wellesz) and performers (Ansermet, Corto) would write articles for this journal that not only painted a remarkable portrait of the musical world and its circulating ideas, but also situated musical creation within an international context and deepened the burning questions around language and aesthetics during the 1920s and the 1930s. The texts that emerge undeniably point toward a French modernity, surpassing the intransigent nationalism that had marked the French musical milieu before the war of 1914-1918. Through an analysis of special editions, musical supplements and concert programs from the journal, we attempt to define the foundation and the markers of a modern music as envisaged by Prunières and his regular collaborators. The readers of La Revue musicale were intimately linked to those of the Nouvelle Revue française, which edited Prunière’s journal in the 1920s. The project of La Revue musicale is consequently associated with a “social” vision of the world that translated into music through the edification of the idea of a universal modernism, leaning on certain attributes of classicism, but also transcending boundaries, the times and the conflicts that marked the recent history of the West.

Why have Stravinsky’s biographies been rewritten? The composer’s implication

Stravinsky’s aesthetic break with his first neoclassical works resulted in the division of the discourse on the composer into two fields: “for” or “against” Stravinsky. The composer himself approached these judgments with a radicalism that helped conceive of his critics as enemies and his partisans as apologists. Hence, the most significant “authorized” commentators of Stravinsky’s work have been at the same time his collaborators, friends, faithful defenders, and servants. Although Stravinsky did not found a school, his greatest disciples can be identified among his particular exegetists: Lourié, Souvtchinski, Schaeffner, and Cingria. Schloezer was the only great “independent” musicologist who mounted a significant opposition to the exegetical discussion directed or supported by the composer.

By surrounding himself with intellectuals who were prepared to write monographs or help place ideas in books and journal articles, Stravinsky indirectly became his own director of communications. At the same time, his pronouncements in the press, the journalistic interviews that routinely preceded his concerts and premieres, and his early radio interviews, which he conducted with discipline and seriousness, are witness to his mastery of media resources.

The body of Stravinsky’s messages with which he accompanied the circulation of his works could serve as a new area of musicological activity: the artist’s promotion of his own work. This area would be situated between the two generally accepted fields of the discipline, those of musical composition and reception, and it would be valid from the moment when the composer begins to make use of the media. Recordings, concerts in which he/she participates as soloist or conductor, and the written formulations of his/her thinking all take part in his/her mediatization and promote this phenomenon of star cult. In this sense, Stravinsky was the first great example of an artist who paid such care to his own publicity.

Katharine Ellis (Royal Holloway, University of London), A dictionary in the making: Fétis, Farrenc and the second edition of the Biographie universelle des musiciens.

As a basic resource, the second edition of François-Joseph Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (1860-65) is one of the most vilified essentials available to musicologists specialising in the 19th century. On publication, its breadth of coverage — even in comparison with the first edition (1835-44) — immediately made it the standard European reference work in music. Famously inaccurate, nationalist, and opinionated, it provides a window onto the thought of one of the most influential historian-critics of the century. It is at once a testament to Fétis’s breadth of learning and to his overweening intellectual ambition.

However, in the final stages of preparation (1859-65), Fétis did not work alone. Much more shadowy than the public story of Fétisian gaffes and summary aesthetic judgments is the backstage narrative of the second edition’s production. Fétis, based in Brussels, was considerably helped (and in some cases saved from himself) by his unsung assistant editor, the publisher Aristide Farrenc. The two maintained a detailed correspondence until shortly before Farrenc’s death in 1865, discussing everything from points of factual accuracy, to galley-proof problems, to (more interestingly) the justification for certain of Fétis’s evaluative claims. Farrenc’s side of the dialogue is voluminous and kept among the Papiers Fétis at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Although widely known about, it has never, to my knowledge, been studied in detail. The same is true of Farrenc’s personal ‘notes to rectify and complete’ the first edition of the dictionary.

Taking the Farrenc-Fétis correspondence as its starting point, and moving to a comparison of the two editions of the dictionary via selected case studies, this paper takes us to the rock face of 19th-century musical historiography. It analyses both the processes of history-making, taking particular account of the twists and turns of Fétis’s views (and the reasons behind them), and the complex of attitudes (not all of them consistent) that underpinned the construction of one of our central musicological monuments.

In the course of his life, the eminent musicologist Curt Sachs experienced three different musicological environments each of which had a substantial impact on his ideas and on his actual work as an educator of musical matters. Dealing with three different facets of his work, the paper raises the question to which extent Sachs’ musicological output can be understood as a work in progress by investigating his “2000 Jahre Musik auf der Schallplatte”, his Anthologie sonore series, and his concept of the Lincoln Center Museum of the Performing Arts comprising musical instruments in addition to the holdings of the New York Public Library.

The six-volume Muzikal’naja enciklopedija, under the general editorship of Iu. V. Keldysh, is an exhaustive work cataloguing the history of music and musicians. Indeed, it is the Russian New Grove. First published under Keldysh in 1973, it was the Soviet Union’s answer to similar works in the U.S., France, and (West) Germany. Perhaps more than anything it is a window that peers on the Soviet musicianship and Soviet musicology. The scope is remarkable, and extremely fruitful. It provides a comprehensive look at Russian music history and theory, as well as the music history and theory of all of the peoples that made up the USSR (material that simply cannot be found in other non-Russian sources). However, the entries often take on political meaning:

Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich: (b. 3/27/1927, Baku). Cellist and conductor. In 1946 graduated from the Moscow Conservatory as cellist in the studio of S.M. Kozolupov. ... From 1974 has lived abroad. In 1978 Rostropovich and his wife, G.P. Vishnevskaya were stripped of their Soviet citizenship for actions that were detrimental to the prestige of the Soviet Union. [From 1983 edition.]

Meanwhile, the entry for Daniil Shafran, Rostropovich’s cellist contemporary who did not defect from the USSR, speaks exclusively in glowing terms of Shafran, and of his commitment to the Communist Party.

Herein lies the conundrum of this resource: With such political propaganda, it is clearly difficult to take what the authors are saying seriously, while at the same time one cannot deny the great wealth of rigorous musical material. Uncovering the mystery of this vast resource will be the central element of this talk.

Like innumerable refugees from Nazi Europe, Arnold Schoenberg, pioneer of musical modernism and one of the most polarizing figures in 20th-century music, spent an important part of his creative life in America, contributing considerably to America’s music culture. Yet comparatively little has been written about Schoenberg’s American years. Instead, critics and scholars have perpetuated unexamined clichés. Most striking is the fact that discussions of Schoenberg’s American career tend to present predominantly negative interpretations. In one view the emphasis is on Schoenberg the elitist, lone genius, and composer of complex music who stubbornly refused to adapt to his new Californian environment. In another view Schoenberg’s attempts to accommodate to America by compromising his progressive European compositional approach is criticized. In a further perspective, problems including the reception of Schoenberg’s music and financial issues (aggravated by health issues), are indirectly blamed on America and its commercially oriented culture. Reasons for such one-sided viewpoints lie in the fact that Schoenberg’s personality and work reveal conflicting tendencies, that his music and aesthetics are still controversial, and that Schoenberg commentators approach their subject with widely differing agendas. Positive or balanced discussions of Schoenberg’s American years are rare. This paper traces and analyzes depictions of Schoenberg’s American "exile" in reference works, exile studies, and more specialized literature on Schoenberg in order to identify clichés, gaps, agendas, and changing trends. Pertinent views about Schoenberg’s personality will first be illuminated, followed by a discussion of influential interpretations of his American compositions and his work as a teacher. In order to overcome a continuous partisan confrontation of selected observations, more holistic biographical approaches informed by ideas of cultural theory and newer exile studies as well as an overall view of international interpretations must now be applied to Schoenberg’s life and work in America.

Virgínia Costa Figueiredo (California State University, Fullerton), The changes in Portuguese music from fascism to democracy.

The paper will present changes in Portuguese music—its style and function—from the time when Portugal was governed by a fascist dictatorship (from the 1930s) through the Portuguese revolution on 25 April 1974 and the democratic political system that followed. The study will include a general overview of popular music as well as classical music, and cultural changes that directly affected the musical environment, particularly architecture, sculpture, and also other arts.

During the one-day revolution of 1974, as well as the period preceding to it, music played an important role as a code that started the revolution, as a vehicle for transmitting of prohibited messages, and as a bond among the common Portuguese people. During this period, music as well as all other sources of expression, was strictly analyzed by censure agents. Following I will discuss the role of music in the Portuguese democracy, and the differences in compositional style between the music composed before the revolution and that composed afterwards.

One of the most unique and perhaps controversial musical figures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was Camille Saint-Saëns. In addition to being a composer, pianist, organist, writer, critic, and amateur astronomer, he was also a musicologist and ethnomusicologist in his own right whose interests lay in the performance practice of early music such as Gregorian chant, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, and even Chopin. Saint-Saëns was also interested in the music of non-Western cultures because of his frequent visits to Algiers and the Far East. He went to extensive lengths to offer authentic representations of non-Western melodies and rhythms in his compositions, not to mention authentic music from Tudor England for his opera Henri VIII.

Saint-Saëns’s voluminous correspondence and published writings — such as the École buissonière and Au courant de la vie — document his thoughts on authentic performance practice, and his desire to realize authentic musical manuscript sources when the idea of critical musical editions was in its infancy. Throughout his career as a composer and performer Saint-Saëns explored facets of musicology and ethnomusicology that are taken for granted today.

This presentation will explore Saint-Saëns’s own writings on musicological subjects, in addition to those on his forays into non-Western musical styles. Specific compositions of Saint-Saëns discussed will include Samson et Dalila and the Suite algérienne, as well as the composer’s writings on the music of Rameau, Bach, Palestrina, and Chopin, in addition to his thoughts on the performance of early music that he delivered in San Francisco in 1915. Other questions investigated in this presentation will include how the composer’s views on and research into early music influenced his own musical composition, and how his exploration of non-Western music is manifested in his own music. This paper will also draw upon unique letters held in the Northwestern University Music Library that portray the composer’s thoughts on early music as well as his thoughts on music aesthetics not discussed in his other writings.

Karen Fournier (The University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh), Cultural capital as a determinant of trends in music research.

In La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (1979), Pierre Bourdieu outlines a concept that becomes indispensable to those who wish to examine the sociology of academia. "Cultural capital", as the concept is described by its creator, provides a way for sociologists to examine the notion of "success" as it pertains to groups of individuals (such as artists, writers, and academics) whose achievements are not always measurable in monetary terms but which are, nonetheless, esteemed by the general populace. In contrast with the material signs of financial success, however, "cultural capital" represents a set of non-economic indicators by which success is measured by individuals within particular intellectual and creative groups. In a later study of academia, entitled Homo academicus (1983), Bourdieu illustrates the concept with reference to scholarly groups where, he argues, success is gauged by such "cultural capital" as academic affiliation, professorial rank, the volume and venue of publications, and name recognition. Bourdieu argues that, like the class system associated with material success, academia exhibits its own hierarchy and is dominated by those who possess certain key indicators of success (or "cultural capital"). Having attained a certain status within their academic group, scholars who are acknowledged to be successful assume the role of "gatekeepers" (to borrow a terms from Thomas Kuhn’s influential tract, The structure of scientific revolutions, 1962) and enforce "the rules of the game" for those scholars who wish to climb the proverbial ladder of success. Bourdieu’s concept of "cultural capital" thus described raises some important questions for those who wish to examine trends in musical scholarship, particularly in light of the ongoing debate about the epistemological orientation of musical analysis. Critics of the discipline of music like Joseph Kerman (Contemplating music, 1985) and Kevin Korsyn (Decentering music, 2003) have drawn attention to the authoritative status of certain research paradigms within the discipline (notably, such seemingly objective programs as Schenkerian and set-theoretic analysis) and have urged music scholars to explore their subjective relationship to musical works or to consider the historical circumstances within which works were composed or received. However, given the description of academia offered by Bourdieu, we are left to wonder how (or if) such paradigm shifts can take place within a hierarchy whose gatekeepers determine success according to the criteria by which their work was measured. What needs to change within academia to allow scholars to accumulate "cultural capital" from different types of research programs? In the proposed study, a sample of current academic writing in the area of music theory will be used to illustrate how research trends are introduced to a body of scholars, how they take hold, and how they come to be supplanted by new trends. The study will rely upon an analysis of discourse used by these scholars, and will measure the degree to which each invokes existing research trends in an effort to appeal to the "gatekeepers" who will gauge the merits of their work and the extent to which each introduces new research programs in their work. The study will demonstrate how scholars can direct their readership to accept new ideas by grafting familiar terminology and methodologies onto unfamiliar research terrain, and will therefore reveal the ways in which "success" might be attained by those who question the research programs embraced by established scholars.

Daniel G. Geldenhuys (University of South Africa, Pretoria), Enlightening a continent: The legacy of a music history in Africa

The legacy of recording a music history in Africa is more often an oral tradition, being in many instances inherited through the performances and perceptions of the music itself. Written texts on the subject appeared later on mainly as a result of colonialism, inevitably leading to a rewriting of music history in and after a post-colonial and post-apartheid era. As most of these histories had not been written down and having only been perceived aurally, they are often judged or misjudged by the Western musicological world as of little importance or even superficial and rather to be ignored. This has led to the perception among Africans that they are still living on a dark and forgotten continent, as their intellectual histories are being disregarded by many on the rest of the globe. Not only the musical and cultural domains are affected by these misjudgements, but other areas for instance on the economical, medical and humanitarian terrain are influenced negatively.

Daniel G. Geldenhuys (University of South Africa, Pretoria), Enlightening a continent: The legacy of a music history in Africa

The legacy of recording a music history in Africa is more often an oral tradition, being in many instances inherited through the performances and perceptions of the music itself. Written texts on the subject appeared later on mainly as a result of colonialism, inevitably leading to a rewriting of music history in and after a post-colonial and post-apartheid era. As most of these histories had not been written down and having only been perceived aurally, they are often judged or misjudged by the Western musicological world as of little importance or even superficial and rather to be ignored. This has led to the perception among Africans that they are still living on a dark and forgotten continent, as their intellectual histories are being disregarded by many on the rest of the globe. Not only the musical and cultural domains are affected by these misjudgements, but other areas for instance on the economical, medical and humanitarian terrain are influenced negatively.

More than often the founders and authors of these musical histories are anonymous, having been portrayed verbally by their followers and those inheriting the tradition, with the inevitable resulting variations on the theme. The lack of written down evidence complicates the matter even further, making traditional research methods almost obsolete. Attention will also be paid to later developments where histories had been written down, to the way in which these histories had been and are interpreted, to the special problems encountered in obtaining information on the topics, as well as to the issue of rendering this kind of information in text when applied to the standards set by contemporary encyclopaedic editorial requirements.

Curt Sachs went down in history partly due to his universal classification of musical instruments established with Erich von Hornbostel in 1914. Constant reference for organologists and ethnomusicologists, Sachs is also a precursor — probably more forgotten — of musical museology. In September 1933, under the Nazi Regime, he lost all his positions and left Berlin. Welcomed by the head of the Musée d’ethnographie in Paris to "collaborate with the classification of musical instruments with André Schaeffner", he stayed there till his departure to New York in July 1937. Sachs’s contribution overrun this task: he prepared an exhibition on sacred dance, cared for the French translation of his World History of the Dance, wrote a book on musical instruments in Madagascar, and published La signification, la tâche et la technique muséographique des collections d’instruments de musique.

The paper will emphasize that this is a real Manifesto devoted to the aims of musical instruments’ museums and restoration deontology, underlying principles for a museographic program and technical aspects. It will underline how much Sachs’s philosophy takes in account hearing and vision, focusing the debate on "the major idea of the exhibition" and not on the collection, and building a theory of the "musical object" never updated. Many of his propositions far exceed an "aesthetic" concept of Western music, reflecting the concerns of a "universalistic" musicologist having a prospective look during a crucial moment in the museums’ evolution. We will concentrate also on the fact that many museographic proposals of the last decades were not sustained, astonishingly, by renewed and written theories in musical museology.

Léo Delibes by Henri de Curzon: A stereotypical French musician biography of the early 20th century?

While preparing a work on Léo Delibes, I soon had to face several fundamental questions: How to write the biography of a musician today? What is the significance of the new undertaking when the musician has already been the subject of biographical investigation? In addition to problems inherent to all historical biographies, musical biographies have their specific demands. Besides, previous works have to be assessed in their historical context in order to make use of it in the most judicious way possible. Starting out from Henri Curzon’s Léo Delibes, sa vie, son oeuvre (1926), I wanted to take a careful look at biographers’ work at the time (critical reading of sources, the place of analysis in the text, value judgments); by comparing it with other works by Curzon, as well as with other musician biographies from the same period, I attempted to answer the following questions: Did there exist a stereotypical musician biography around the early 20th century, the way there was stereotypical music criticism in the 19th century? Who were the authors of these biographies, who published them, what public were they looking to reach? Are they — like music criticism – indicative of the reception of a composer’s work? What is their place in musicology, which was coming into its own at the time? Do they possess any specific traits in comparison to biographies of non-musicians?

The paper challenges the common belief that all important ideas in musicology are available in either English or German by introducing the theory of "sonoristics", a unique method of analysis developed in Polish musicology in the 1950s and 1960s. This theory, which was widely adopted by scholars in Central and Eastern Europe, never reached beyond the Iron Curtain. Today, some 40 years after its formulation, sonoristics still remains largely unknown to the Western world.

Sonoristics has been defined as a branch of musicological inquiry situated on the borders of music theory, compositional practice, and the psychology of hearing. Essentially, it focuses on 20th-century compositional techniques and seeks to describe the purely sonorous qualities generated by this music. In doing so, it dispenses with traditional analytic categories and proposes a new classification of formal issues based on textural and timbral considerations. This very ability to explain in structural terms the most elusive element — timbre — of the musical work has made sonoristics an attractive analytical tool, capable of illuminating music written before the 20th century, including that of Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven.

In this paper, I discuss the development of sonoristic theory in the context of the musical style of the post-Stalinist Polish avant-garde known as "sonorism." I amend Ian Bent’s assertion that "the analysis of music as sonorous material had remained comparatively undeveloped" (Ian Bent, Analysis [New York: Norton, 1987], p. 71) and present sonoristic analyses of works by Beethoven and Penderecki. Finally, I contrast sonoristics with other analytical approaches developed in the 20th century and argue for a wider recognition of perspectives formulated outside of "mainstream" musicology.

Edward Green (Manhattan School of Music), The impact of Rousseau on the histories of Burney and Hawkins.

The year 1776 was a critical year for English scholarship, being the year of Smith’s Wealth of Nations as well as the first volume of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was likewise a critical year for musicology; two great and comprehensive histories of music appeared — those of Burney and Hawkins. It has long been appreciated how different these histories are; style alone makes that clear, but so do the differing aesthetic and historical emphases of the authors. What has not been noted is that in good measure these differences can be accounted for by Burney’s great admiration for Rousseau — an enthusiasm absent in Hawkins, the politically conservative magistrate. Not only are there sympathetic echoes of Rousseau’s technical musical writings in Burney, but deeper philosophic and political echoes, equally sympathetic. And, of course, Burney had long been engaged with Rousseau, having composed in 1766 an English version, The Cunning Man, of Rousseau’s 1752 opera, Le devin du village. The writing of music history has always had — explicitly or implicitly — a view of society in it, and a view of humanity. The comparison of these two monumental works, appearing in such a "revolutionary" year, helps us see it plainly.

Vanessa Hawes (University of East Anglia), Number fetishism: The history of the use of information theory as a tool for musical analysis, from its roots to obscurity.

The late 1950s saw the emergence of what Herbert Simon called the science of the artificial: a collaboration of ideas from nascent computer science, linguistics, psychology, mathematics, and engineering governed by a concern for information and its processing.

This paper gives an overview of the different ways writers have used the concept of information theory to analyze music. 1956 becomes my starting point. That year the IEEE Conference of Radio Engineers brought together speakers such as Miller, Herbert and Simon, and Chomsky presenting papers on information theory. It was at this time that the general public (including composers and musicologists) became aware of the implications of information theory in the new intellectual atmosphere.

My material comes from American and European music journals in which there was a trend for information theoretical analyses at this time. The trend eventually trailed off in the 1970s when the ideas did not die, but were incorporated (whether directly or indirectly) into new methods of analysis.

The breadth of analytical methods is surprising. In the 1950s and 60s it was used on different music from different historical periods — from Medieval music to Webern and beyond. The methods used are diverse. Some analyses concentrated on whole pieces and the information theoretical implications of certain forms, some on chunks of music concentrating on the effectiveness of the analysis itself if using different depths of informational analysis. Other methods analyzed information flow from the viewpoint of the composer (the analysis of the score) and yet others from the viewpoint of the listener. The development of the writings and compositions of Lejaren Hiller forms the backbone of my work. He wrote several articles applying information theoretical methods to musical analysis.

By extending the analyses of Hiller I assess the effectiveness of his work and explore the degree to which the reader can glean the same kind of data from an informational analysis that they can from a ‘regular’ musical analysis.

Recent scholarship has worked to describe the stylistic characteristics of the "Hungarian style" that spread across Europe from the late 18th to the early 20th century. This is not, however, the first such effort. In the late 19th century, when Hungarian music journals and other major musical institutions were being established, one of the major issues critics addressed was the definition of what it meant to write Hungarian music.

This paper uses examples from late 19th- and early 20th-century writings to show how Hungarian music critics strove to position Hungarian music "between German and Gypsy". On the one hand, the primary performers of popular Hungarian-style music were Rom, which led to the alternative label of the style as "Gypsy music". After Liszt wrote in his 1859 Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie that the Gypsies, not the Hungarians, were the primary creative force behind the Hungarian style, Hungarian music critics felt compelled to defend the Hungarians’ claim to it, using examples from several contemporary Hungarian composers, including Liszt. On the other hand, the Hungarian style had become well known outside of Hungary largely as a light exotic adjunct to the central Austro-German tradition. These same music critics developed analytical models to demonstrate that Hungarian composition was distinct from, yet as sophisticated as, Austro-German composition. Others, however — most famously Béla Bartók — rejected the familiar Hungarian-Gypsy style and related analytical models, and they redefined Hungarian music around a new model of Hungarianness in music, the monophonic folk song.

These writings from the beginnings of Hungarian musicology not only offer additional refinements to the description of Hungarian style. They also reveal the explosive cultural and political conflicts that first made the precise description of that style so important — and the musical problems that ultimately made a stable description undesirable.

David Hunter (The University of Texas at Austin), Writing a nation’s musical taste: Hawkins, Burney and the popularization of Handel in the first histories of music.

The cult of Händel and his music is rooted in the activities of writers, performers, enthusiasts and audiences during the late 18th century. The influence of the accounts of Händel by Hawkins and Burney in their histories of music can hardly be exaggerated. Those magisterial sources helped construct and drive the bandwagon of the popular Händel, a story as powerful as any piece of fiction. As arbiters of taste, Hawkins and Burney regulated the meaning of music in Britain and Händel’s place at its head. That Händel was in actuality not a popular figure in the usual sense accorded that adjective (popular typically meaning that he and his music were widely heard and appreciated in Britain during his lifetime) was a fact that the writers had to finesse. The contradictions that arose as a result help us to understand how the writers defined the public for or to whom they spoke. By exploring the economic, political, and religious aspects of what "popularity" meant to Hawkins and Burney as they characterized Händel, I expose not only the contingency of historical writing but also the claims of national status and relevance.

At the 1964 Congress of the International Musicological Society in Salzburg, the young musicologist Wolfgang Plath, who had just assumed the direction of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, proposed two provocative theses about the state of Mozart scholarship. First, he claimed, "Mozart research has fallen into a crisis, whose proximate cause is neglect of fundamentals", and second, "basic research is the methodological and systematic study of sources". Plath argued that scholars were interpreting Mozart’s life and music too much; in 1964 Mozart studies were dominated by the methods known as Geistesgeschichte. The time had come to turn away from these and toward what Plath called "positivism", a philosophy he associated with earlier scholars like Ludwig von Köchel and Otto Jahn. The program he proposed for Mozart studies was astoundingly prescient: at this writing almost all of the projects he outlined — studies of sketches, copyists, paper, handwriting, first editions and other philological issues — have been attempted, with important results. Plath’s polemic is an important document, in its own right, of a specifically German-speaking context. By challenging the consensus that most "fundamental" Mozart research had already been done, Plath called into question the assumption that the main business of musicology was the interpretation of cultural documents. I will suggest that Plath’s program was inspired at least in part by the more pragmatic approach of North American positivists like Arthur Mendel, whose position seems oddly "progressive" in this context. For what was progressive 40 years ago is today, perhaps, "reactionary": that which an influential group of critics, starting with Joseph Kerman, have been determined to expose as the squeaky wheel in the machine of Anglo-Saxon musicology. Indeed, the outline of the recent history of Mozart studies is the outline of the recent history of Anglo-Saxon musicology — only in reverse.

Francesco Florimo (1800-88) is regarded as one of the most important music historians in 19th-century Italy. Librarian and archivist at the Real Collegio di Musica for more than half a century (1826-88), Florimo arranged, catalogued, and systematically enlarged the holdings of the former conservatories of Naples. At the same time, he assembled the material for his monumental La scuola musicale di Napoli e i suoi conservatorii (1880-83, in four volumes), the first scholarly music history of Naples, covering a period from the Middle Ages until the second half of the 19th century. Whereas Florimo’s meticulous approach to recording dates, facts, names, institutions and musical works as completely as possible seems to be overtly positivistic, his principal aim nevertheless is to glorify the Neapolitan musical tradition. On the basis of a long-existing and well-established myth (i.e., the myth of the "Neapolitan school"), his conception of music history is led by the desire to construct the historical framework for a cultural identity of his hometown. Hereby the "continuity" of the "Neapolitan school", substantiated by a thick description and an uninterrupted chronology of facts, serves as an ideological bridge between the universal importance of Naples as a musical capital in the 18th century and — after fundamental cultural changes during the French reign (1806-15) — the comparatively modest importance of contemporary musical life in Naples.

Cleveland Johnson (DePauw University), The first “All-India” music conferences and the advent of modern Indian musicology.

During the decade of 1916-25, five “All-India” music conferences were organized by the Indian musicologist Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) and held throughout North India in Baroda (1916), Delhi (1918), Benares (1919), and Lucknow (1924 and 1925). A further All-India Conference was held in South India in the city of Madras (1927). Enjoying royal sponsorship and broad participation by scholars and performers from both North and South India, these conferences combined the conventions of the Indian music “festival” (the meeting of musicians at a court or temple, where dialogue about the music performed was as important as the performances themselves) and the formal academic conclave (with scholarly papers and lecture-demonstrations) learned through Indian exposure to British academic practices. Activities at these conferences reflected the dynamic interaction and tension between Indian scholarship and the activities of Western researchers. Western investigation of Indian music, despite research activity dating back to the 18th century, was still a young “science”, and priorities still lay in quantifying, analyzing, and interpreting this data through Western lenses. Indian scholars remained very much rooted in musical performance, in reviving or maintaining standards of performance, and in connecting contemporary practice to the writings of ancient theorists. Western influence can be seen, however, in the new attention paid to tuning/intonation, development of notation, music education, and the systematic organization of the Indian musical system of rāga/tāla. This paper explores the activities of these five conferences, looking at the negotiation of Eastern and Western scholarship as Indian scholars resisted/ignored/rejected efforts of comparative musicology and developed independent paths, informed by Western academic traditions but not subservient to them.

In the early 1980s, four colleagues at the University of Copenhagen (including myself) wrote a three-volume general history of Western music as a corrective to the dominant textbook of the 1960s and 1970s, Donald J. Grout’s A History of Western Music (1960 and later editions). The book caused a debate — at times heated — in Danish musicological and pedagogical circles, with very clear political undertones.
In the paper I shall discuss the background of the discussions of musicological paradigms in Denmark from the efforts and achievements of the two great, internationally famed Danish music scholars Jens Peter Larsen (Haydn and Händel) and Knud Jeppesen (Palestrina "style") to the appearance of the book mentioned above. A survey of the reception of the book will be included. I shall claim that in many respects the methodological approach of our music history, which at the time was accused of not dealing with music at all but only with society and (left-wing) political positions, might be included under the current label "new musicology", which nowadays is considered normal drawing-room fare, without any hidden political agenda. Reflections will be presented on the position of music history in the current curriculum of the department of music in Copenhagen, and trends in the projects of Danish music scholars.

Walter Kreyszig (Department of Music, University of Saskatchewan / Center for Canadian Studies, University of Vienna), "Leopold Mozart … a man of much … wisdom": The revival of humanist scholarship in his Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756).

Among the four principal mid-18th-century authors of treatises on organology and performance practice (Alexander Agricola, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Leopold Mozart, and Johann Joachim Quantz), Leopold Mozart represents somewhat of an anomaly. Unlike Agricola, Bach, and Quantz, who in their examinations leap into res media, Leopold Mozart begins his Violinschule with a historic discussion of the origin of string instruments. Viewed in the context of the intellectual climate of Enlightenment philosophy, Mozart’s point of departure for his deliberations, coupled with the old question of the origin of music, thereby unmistakably perpetuating medieval scholasticism, helps rekindle the interest in music historiography; and that in the context of a broader discussion of the superiority of classical over contemporary literature — a debate which after 1750 gradually extended to the other arts. With his exposition viewed in this light, Mozart can be seen to stand at a pivotal point in the history of Western thought. As a staunch defender of the humanist tradition, he sets his historical introduction in bold relief to the ensuing discussion of the violin, which he, in essence, views as progress in music. In this disputatio over ancient versus modern practices, Mozart takes an active role in Voltaire’s "philosophy of history" — a key to Enlightenment reasoning.

This new interpretation of the Violinschule, which has escaped the attention of modern scholars such as Alfred Einstein, Editha Knocker, and Luigi Petrobelli, places Mozart at the center of the debate on historicism and progress — one which continued in the era following the publication of the Violinschule. Here, Mozart is accorded a dual role in music’s intellectual history: as one of the followers of the humanist tradition, and, in his positioning of the principal discourse of the Violinschule around the formulation of progress in music (undoubtedly the most current topic of the Enlightenment) as one of the founders of modern music scholarship. The description of Mozart as "a man of much wisdom" — in the words of Dominicus Hagenauer, Abbot of St. Peter in Salzburg and long-time family friend of the Mozarts — certainly applies to his delicate negotiating of tradition and progress, a dichotomy firmly situated in mid-18th-century Enlightenment debate.

Karl Kügle (University of Utrecht), The "emancipation of the tender element": Music, musicology, and the rhetoric of gender in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig, 1863-1882).

Issues of gender have justifiably informed much recent research in the humanities. Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to determining precisely how, when, and on whose account gender tropes were used in the discourse about music of the German-speaking world, consequently entering the lexicon of Musikwissenschaft and, by extension, of musicology.

This paper examines the deployment of gender stereotypes and gender-based metaphors in one of the most influential German-language music periodicals of the later 19th century, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig, 1863-1882). Strongly influenced by liberal politics, the AmZ was a direct precursor of the first full-fledged musicological journals, most notably the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. Its influence on the discourse of musicology through much of the 20th century was therefore significant.

If the subordinate and passive qualities of the female vis-à-vis the masculine were axiomatic for the authors of the AmZ, the currency derived from such an economy of gender could nevertheless circulate in surprisingly diverse ways, performing a range of cultural tasks. Examples to be considered include (1) the projection of music as a particularly masculine art (in striking difference to the construction of music as a symbol of effeminacy in the Anglo-Saxon world); (2) the gendering of "national" and class characteristics both within and without the realm of music; and (3) the application of gender to music theory and music analysis. The AmZ’s attitudes towards (4) homosexuality, virtuosity, and castrato singing will also be discussed.

Beate Kutschke (Institut für Neue Musik, Universität der Künste, Berlin), Musicology and the force of political fiction: The debate on politically engaged music at the beginning of the 1970s.

At the end of the 1960s, within the course of the general politicization of events around "1968", German musicology was stirred by a debate about political (i.e. politically engaged and/or effective) music. Leading German musicologists (such as Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan), and contemporary composers (such as Helmut Lachenmann and Nikolaus A. Huber) explored the inner logic of the idea of political music. At the beginning of the 1970s, this heated debate was suddenly brought to an end. In 1972, after a fierce discussion, Carl Dahlhaus declared what many had probably thought but nobody had dared express: politically engaged music — politically engaged in the manner avant-garde composers wished it to be, i.e. in a positive, ethically justifiable way and as a contribution to leftist protest movements — did not exist. According to him, political music was either ineffective or demagogical (because it used exclusively emotional means). However, despite the authority Dahlhaus brought to the argument, avant-garde composers such as Luigi Nono, Lachenmann, and Hans Werner Henze continued to claim that their music, directly or indirectly, contributed to sociopolitical change.

In light of this controversy the question arises: What are the reasons for this persistence of the idea of political music, especially with respect to avant-garde music? The idea of music’s potential sociopolitical effects is a episteme in music theory that can be already identified in Plato. However, with respect to avant-garde music, other, more specific, causes are operative. In my paper, I will demonstrate that the impassioned debate at the turn to the 1970s was anchored in a thought figure that had been developed simultaneously with the emergence of atonal music in the 1910s. On the basis of the debates on New Music — its defamation as well as its promotion — which accompanied it from its birth, through the Third Reich, through the reeducation program after Germany’s capitulation and to the leftist intellectual discussions in the 1970s, I will carve out the theoretical line that by continuously attributing a political — first and foremost leftist-oriented and revolutionary — character to New Music has made this political quality into an integral component of the identity of avant-garde music. In this light, musicology presents itself as an image-productive transformation of nonmusical, here political, intellectual climates into music aesthetics.

The place of dance in La Revue musicale under Henry Prunières (1886-1942)

Edited by Henry Prunières (1886-1942) from 1920 to 1940, La Revue musicale had a privileged place in the exchange of and reflection on musical tendencies between the two wars. It also devoted considerable space to nonmusical subjects. Among these, dance took prime place. Articles devoted to dance and their correlation to the aesthetic orientation of La Revue are little known, yet important.
First the arrival of the Ballets Russes (1909-29), then the Ballets Suédois (1920-25), but also the European craze for American dances (tango, fox-trot, Charleston, shimmy, one-step) rekindled the interest of artists and the public in dance and turned ballet into an area sought out by composers for their works. Keen on reflecting the developments of movements in music, La Revue musicale devoted many pages to this art of rhythm and movement. Writings on dance present themselves under different forms. Apart from ballet criticism, there are numerous basic articles, as well as reviews of books on dance and special issues on ballet. The topics discussed, such as the influence of the Sacre du printemps on artistic modernity, and the rediscovery of French ballets of the 16th and 17th century, surely convey positions espoused by the journal. In addition to the regular contributors (André Coeuroy, Boris de Schloezer, Henry Prunières, Émile Vuillermoz), writers (among them Valéry), artists (like Valentine Hugo), ballet specialists (André Levinson), and choreographers (Serge Lifar) published pieces on dance.

The paper will present a survey of each of the categories of dance writings in La Revue musicale between 1920 and 1940, as well as the classification of topics discussed in the articles, evaluating their frequency during the two decades under examination. Through close study of these topics, their reasoning, and the examples cited will demonstrate how these writings contributed to the definition of a French modernism in agreement with the editorial stance of La Revue musicale.

The idea that musicologists (and analysts especially) are qualified to tell performers what to do has been questioned recently, by Joel Lester among others. But although great strides have been made by both experimental psychologists (Clarke, Clynes, Repp, Scherer and many others) and students of performance on record (Bowen, Cook, Philip, et al.), learning from performers how music works is by no means a straightforward alternative. Nevertheless, it can be argued that musicologists and analysts, in developing new understandings of music, have been following along behind performers for the past 100 years without realising it. And there’s no reason to assume that that was any less true before the invention of recording: recordings simply provide us with the evidence that enables us to show it happening.

Two repertoires will be explored here: Schubert songs and modernist orchestral works of the 1950s and 1960s. In each case we can see how developments in performance precede changes in verbal interpretation, and in each it is reasonable to propose that it was the insights of performers that gave scholars ideas about what the music means. A consideration of the mechanism underlying this process inevitably shows musical interpretation, in whatever medium, as a function of much wider changes in society to which historical and analytical musicology are just as subject as is performance. Scholars, because they are subject to the power structures of academia as opposed to the commercial pressures felt by performers, are just slower to respond.

Frederic Lemmers (Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Bruxelles), The role of discography in studying translations of operas

The purpose of this paper is to sketch out the role of sound recordings as a source of study of operas in translation. Since operas tended to be sung in national languages until the end of the 1950s, the repertory of operas in translation makes up a significant portion of programming, historically. In French-speaking areas, opera houses were so much attached to translations that they staged almost as many operas in French as in all other languages together. From the end of the 19th century up through the first half of the 20th century, this repertoire of operas in translation was recorded by many artists.

The main difference between operas in translation and operas in the original language arises in the relationship between text and music. The musical quality of a literary text is directly linked to the language used and influences the aesthetic identity of an opera. From one language to another, and thus from one libretto to another, the prosody, the fundamental rhythm, and the tonic accents all change.

Two questions can be raised: (1) What influences do the specific characteristics of a translation have on the performer’s approach? (2) What status does the translation possess in relation to the original? Are they the same work or two different ones? A comparison of historical recordings of Cherubino’s aria "Voi che sapete" from Le nozze di Figaro by Mozart, sung in Italian or, alternatively, in French, discloses aesthetic characteristics associated with translation, characteristics not apparent from printed sources such as scores, librettos, and critical notices. Subtle variations of color, rhythm, dynamics, and vocal technique between the different recorded excerpts we shall listen to help clarify the relationship between operas in translation and in an original language, and suggest an aesthetics of interpretation linked directly to the language of the libretto.

Urve Lippus (Estonian Academy of Music, Tallinn), A man and his portraits: The image of Gustav Ernesaks in (Soviet) writings on music.

The idea of this paper goes back to the early 1990s, when I was asked to update some articles concerning Estonian music for the new edition of the Grove’s dictionary. Analyzing earlier entries about the choral conductor and composer Gustav Ernesaks (1908-93) in several international music dictionaries, I was somewhat upset by the divergence of those concise portraits from my own ideas about the most important ways to represent him. Ernesaks is really among the most intricate persons for a study aiming to understand musical life in Soviet Estonia and Soviet cultural life in general: He was trusted and beloved by people as the leader of national choral movement, and at the same time he was one of the top figures supported and promoted by the Soviet authorities to represent Estonian music. This paper will compare different lexical entries and other reference materials about Ernesaks from the 1950s to the present, considering (1) the selection of facts concerning his life and works, and (2) direct or covert evaluations presented in those writings. The case of Ernesaks can be used for demonstrating some problems that confront researchers in their work with sources reflecting musical life and reception history, but it also reveals the shaping force of the tradition of writing upon its subject. The format of reference books and other reference materials places composing in the center of musical activities (listing operas and large-scale symphonic works, then mentioning selectively works for smaller ensembles and small-scale pieces), and relegates amateur choral singing to the outer margin. As a result, this charismatic leader of the masses (as Ernesaks was, according to his colleagues, students, and singers) and author of many ingenious but short and simple songs, is predominantly characterized by listing his high titles, state prizes, official posts, and five (forgotten) operas.

Martin Lodge (University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand), A broad drama without detail: The strange case of nonexistent music history writing in New Zealand.

Polynesians began settling New Zealand around the 13th century, later becoming known as Maori, the indigenous people of the land. When European explorers arrived in 1642, the very first contact between European and Maori was a musical exchange between the Baroque bugle of Abel Tasmans’s ship and answering pukaea (wooden trumpets) of Maori on the shore. That improvised musical dialogue resulted in a deadly cultural misunderstanding. A ship’s journal report of the violent incident stands as the first written document in New Zealand’s musical history.

In 1840 a highly unusual political act took place when the British crown and the majority of Maori tribes voluntarily signed a treaty agreeing to pursue a future of peaceful coexistence between the two cultures. Government was ceded to Britain while Maori were guaranteed permanent ownership of all their possessions, including cultural practices and values.

While Western music has been played, written and even published from the early days of colonisation, the first history of music in New Zealand was not published until 1991. J.M. Thomson’s The Oxford history of New Zealand music remains the sole book in its field. More strangely, no scholarly biographical monograph has yet been published of a New Zealand composer, either white or Maori.

The dearth of critical and documentary writing in New Zealand music history, particularly over the past 150 years, despite a large amount of musical activity, may be attributable to the fact that music has played a negligible role in the emerging narrative of postcolonial nationalism in New Zealand. Significant factors include music’s powerful relationship to the unique New Zealand soundscape, a dualistic persistence of both European and Maori musical traditions, the very late development of a significant body of Western art music composition indigenous to the country, and a national preoccupation with the visual arts.

Antonio Lovato (Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia Università di Padova), The Cecilian movement and the interpretation of music history during the nineteenth century Italy

Among the motivating reasons of the origin of the Cecilian movement in nineteenth-century Italy there was the need to restore the musical repertories of the past, believed to be absolute and artistically unreachable. In order to understand how this recovery has been made, it is necessary to take into account the contribution on sacred music in the periodical La Civiltà Cattolica from 1850 to 1903, which contained numerous articles on devotional music, organ and folk songs, editions of sources, and reviews of textbooks of Gregorian chant and liturgical music. In this context, the pivotal element played Angelo de Santi (1847– 1922), who worked on Civiltà Cattolica for over 35 years and developed in it a systematic and methodical approach to history of music, aesthetics, and music criticism related to the liturgy. With his extensive knowledge, unusual interest in the international discussions, comprehensive bibliographical information, and attention to the methodological innovations and scientific results, De Santi outlined history of music from the beginning of Christian times to the fifteenth century. His research was based on the musical and documentary sources, paleography, and the knowledge of treatises. Such cultural experience led him to a detailed analysis of the musical forms within their historical contexts. Even if Angelo de Santi seems to show a prejudicial attitude toward contemporary music, on the contrary, his aim – as well as that of the Catholic world – was to discover the lost authentic musical idioms and as a consequence he rejected any kind of modern liturgical music.

Beatriz Magalhães-Castro (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Lisbon), Haydn’s Iberian world connections: New perspectives on Robert Stevenson’s contributions to Latin American music studies.

Studies concerning the dissemination of the classical style during the 18th and early 19th centuries, initially focused on the practice of instrumental music in the Luso-Brazilian culture, have opened substantial areas for study on the ways of the style’s circulation, reception, and reproduction throughout the Iberian Peninsula and its New World colonies. A sampling of pertinent data obtained from an analysis of P-La MS 4986, consulted at Lisbon’s Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, regarding a handwritten catalog of works previously existent in the musical archives of the Conde do Farrobo (1801-69), reveals substantial knowledge and practice of instrumental music from composers assimilated to 18th-century musical styles, with a major predominance of works by Joseph Haydn.

The development of this subject has been hampered by the shortage or inadequacy of Iberian and Latin American primary sources, but also by some assumptions on the part of traditional musicologists concerning the function and dynamics of instrumental music practice in these countries. These factors have combined to discredit studies on this subject or relegate them to a secondary status. Nonetheless, Robert Stevenson’s work has established significant musicological foundations for envisaging broader perspectives in the studies of colonial and postcolonial musical identities. This enlargement of scope allows a finer and more appropriate contextualization of the music composed in Latin American countries, especially of the so-called colonial style.

Focused on the reception of Joseph Haydn in the Iberian world — in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico — this paper updates current research on the subject and discusses the manner in which the broader musical perspective may serve as the foundation upon which the so-called "national" productions flourished during the 18th century. Aspects such as the circulation of printed music, social roles and practices, and the processes of dissemination of musical taste, among others, are analyzed from a synchronic rather than a diachronic perspective, using sources found at the national libraries of Lisbon, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro, some still unknown to musicological studies.

Although Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834-1911) is usually considered the founder of Croatian music historiography, two other highly important figures should also be pointed out: Vjenceslav Novak (1859-1905) and Vjekoslav Klaic (1849-1928). Kuhač’s efforts marked the beginning of systematic research in Croatia in the field of the history of music. However, it must be said that Kuhač’s conviction that music historiography, just like music itself, ought to endorse and promote national identity sometimes interfered with his scholarly objectivity in the interpretation of certain historical facts, and even led him to arbitrary and unsupported conclusions. As a historian Klaic, like Kuhač, focused his scholarly interest mainly on the period of the Croatian National Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Some of his biographical studies still function as relevant and respectable sources. A recognized writer, Novak was not a researcher himself but primarily a pedagogue. Among his works the most important is his general survey of music history, the first written in Croatian, which lay unpublished until 1994. Thus the first published periodization of Croatian music history was displayed in the aesthetic system of the philosopher Franjo Marković (1845-1914). The Croatian National Movement was the focus of the researchers’ interest, and was treated a starting point of the Croatian history of music, for two reasons. First, the older periods were basically unknown, and second, the impact of national ideology on all fields of social and cultural life was extremely strong.

Marin Marian-Bălaşa (Romanian Academy of Sciences, Bucharest), Influence of communist ethnomusicology on the formation and growth of nationalist ethnocentrism.

The fact that the ethnological disciplines were born during and because of great national awakenings and movements is well known. Not so well known is that the late phase of Romanian communism was nourished by ethnological disciplines too, and that, in fact, a main reason why the state supported ethnological (ethnomusicological) research was to use it as an ideological tool, turning it into an applied science of political consequences. In this paper I focus not only on the historical changes, incentives, pressures, and manipulations that occurred in the 1950s — as it is somehow typical in contemporary criticism (in Romania as well as within other states) — but also on the most recent aspects, because the dominant scholarly narrative is still indebted either to communist and postcommunist thinking, or to neotraditionalist, antimodernist, currents. Several delicate, controversial, and dangerous ideological shifts and orientations, such as the extreme nationalist trends of the 1990s, will be revealed, and the ways in which they draw resources from academic research will be also discussed.

Serbian 19th-century writings about music, which represent the starting point of Serbian musicology, demonstrate the cultural distance between Habsburg and Ottoman influences. The Serbian middle class provided the background for artistic musical life at the time, which centered on the Romantic ideology and on Enlightenment ideas. A particularly important role was played by members of the Serbian intelligentsia living in Vienna, where the first Serbian professional musicians also studied. An examination of different aspects of 19th-century writings on music — from the earliest attempts to create music terminology in the Serbian language to literary and music journals and the first music biographies, bibliographies, and national music histories — proves the fact that Vienna was in the 19th century one of the main centers of Serbian culture and arts. Some of those aspects will be presented in a comparison with Viennese music and cultural journals, including articles about music and music life, with special emphasis on calendars (for instance, Bacvanin: Kalendar i zabavnik, Novi Sad; Pancevac: Narodni kalendar, Pancevo; Frommes musikalische Welt, Vienna).

Anna Massiou (King’s College, University of Cambridge), No ordinary sign: Following the virga in chant research and the notation at the Abbey of Monte Cassino.

In the history of chant scholarship, the virga has been the most controversial of all notational signs. In the 1954 inaugural volume of Études Grégoriennes, published by the Abbey of Solesmes, Michel Huglo asserted that the virga sign, one of the two "basic" one-note signs from which all other signs supposedly derived, was associated with the medieval grammarians’ acute accent. This view of the origins of Western chant notation had changed little since E. Coussemaker’s proposal of the "accent theory" over a century earlier.

The closer description and publication of representative Gregorian manuscripts that followed the first steps of the Solesmes-led Gregorian Revival, however, presented complications: Evidence showed that the "accent theory" was far from bulletproof. In the examination of a South Italian notation, Paolo Ferretti noticed three different types of virga, the last one of which did not fit with the tenets of the theory. The final blow was delivered by Jacques Handschin’s 1950 identification in "Palaeofrankish" notation of what looked like a virga sign with the two-note sign of pes. Resemblance of shape between two signs, he then showed, need not lead to identical meaning. What was next needed was an examination of the function of the signs, i.e., a discussion of their semiology. Still as late as 1968 the prime semiologist, Eugène Cardine, although himself aware of the virga’s different functions, was still attached to the accent theory’s received wisdom by summarizing "virga = high note".

It was evident that the traditional philological methods employed by chant scholars had not been as productive as hoped. With strong criticism from other musicological fields looming, chant scholarship had to think big, making friends and foes in the process: It applied methods used by other humanistic fields such as literary criticism, sociology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and psychology. Under this new approach, the discussion of the meaning of signs seemed at best irrelevant, deferred in favor of considerations of the musical situation before the written sources. Leo Treitler, nevertheless, reasserted the significance of neumes in his 1982 article on music-writing. Treitler perceived a special dynamic in South Italian notation and related that dynamic to the formation of Western musical notation in general. The sign of the virga was instrumental in this discussion.

Since then, many have emphasised the need to return to examination of the written records, of specific scriptoria, and of neumes (Richard Crocker, 1995; David Hiley, 1997; Susan Rankin, 1990). With this paper, I wish to examine once again this most controversial sign, the virga, in the context of the South Italian notation at the scriptorium of Monte Cassino. I show how the notators had a special preoccupation with the documentation of the flow of the melody, and how the virga was eventually employed for showing precise pitch. I show what triggered interest in this precision and what stalled the use of such notation. I follow the virga’s development as a shape, its neumatic context, and its employment as well as its theoretical understanding in the Cassinese milieu. With this I aim to show why understanding the signs is still instrumental in tracing musical practice, experience and understanding. I argue that understanding signs is a means of understanding how people made sense of their musical world, and thus helps achieve the humanistic goals of the diverse disciplines which now inform chant study.

James Melo (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, New York), Macunaíma out of the woods: The meanders of musicology and ethnomusicology in Brazil.

For much of the 20th century, the development of Brazilian musicology went hand in hand with the fashioning of a musical language that was representative of the national character. The pioneering studies of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) were linked with the notion that Brazil’s musical culture should be acknowledged and thoroughly assimilated — and, in some instances, literally rescued — before any attempts at universalism (both artistic and scholarly) were made. Thus, musicology and ethnomusicology became invariably entwined in the writings of Brazilian academics, mirroring parallel trends throughout much of Latin America.

This phenomenon, however, is far from being exclusive to Latin America. Rather, it stemmed from the rise of nationalism as an aesthetic criterion in European music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as such it represented another locus for the affirmation of national identity. The development of musicology as a systematic and academic discipline in Brazil occurred relatively late. Cultural, political, and economic factors coalesced to delay the systematization of a discipline that was seen, until relatively recently, as peripheral to the academic culture in Brazil. While other disciplines in the humanities have long been supported by an economic, institutional, and academic infrastructure, musicology as a comprehensive scholarly enterprise has only recently been given thorough academic legitimacy through the establishment of graduate programs throughout the country. The development of this process will be traced throughout the 20th century, and in relation to the economic, political, and cultural changes that shaped the discipline in Brazil. The production of Brazilian musicology and ethnomusicology will be surveyed and compared in an attempt to discern their common premises, the perception of their relative importance in the cultural milieu of the country, and their role as surrogates of Brazilian music. As a case study, changing perceptions of nationalism and its role in the formation of Brazilian musical identity, especially the international reception of Villa-Lobos, will be examined.

Marina Mikhailets (Riga), Musicology in Latvia: Three periods, three points of view.

Musicology in Latvia has always been tightly connected with political situation, and its history can be divided into three periods: period when Latvia was an independent state (1919-1940), (2) period when it was a part of the USSR (1940-1991), and (3) period of the country’s new independence since 1991.

During the first period musicology as a science was not developed. Muzikas vesture (Music history) by Jāzeps Vītols (1863-1948) was the first musicological book published in the Latvian language (1934), and it included a chapter on Latvian composers. Prominent ware also the works on musical folklore by the composer and folklorist Andrejs Jurjans. During the 1920s and 1930s developed highly professional music criticism. Among scholars of non-Latvian origin living in Latvia, the most prominent was Salomo Rozovsky, who started in Riga his work on cantillation in Bible, which he completed in the U.S. after his emigration in the early 1930s. The Soviet period was tightly connected with the Soviet ideology: Research of most composers who left the country after World War II was banned. The study of earlier (bourgeois) period of Latvian music development was undesirable. This was the reason that monographs and textbooks did not provide adequate evaluation of the previous historical period, and they were restricted only to the most important composers of the 1920s and 1930s impossible to avoid (Jāzeps Vītols, Alfrēd Kalniņš, Emilis Melngailis). The positive aspect of the research during the Soviet period was that the Latvian musicology developed in connection with the Russian musicological traditions. The faculty for musicology was founded at the Latvian conservatory in Riga, where for many years taught Jekabs Vitolinš, Jekabs Graubinš, Lija Krasinska, V. Lindenberga, and Janis Torgans. All of them were superb scholars, who produced monographs about composers and researched the development of Latvian symphony, opera, ballet, vocal music and others.

Since the liberation of Latvia in 1991 all topics are allowed in research, and a new generation of musicologists came forward. The main interest for the last ten years was the Baltic German music from the 16th-18th century and older period. However, the Latvian national music history has to be newly examined in order to include in its canon all important names and re-evaluate its whole development. This task is, however, not so easy, since many Latvian musicologists are mostly working on collecting historical materials from archives, private collections, and newspapers. Most papers have a descriptive character, lacking analytical approach. The contemporary music criticism has not reached a high level.

Melita Milin (Institut za Muzikologiju, Belgrade), The place of small musical cultures in reference books.

Works of music historiography should ideally be written by authors with a vast knowledge of many different national music histories, since one of their main aims is to analyze the changing interrelationships between different national music cultures. As such knowledge is rarely found, general histories of music tend to be either focused on the main lines of development and thus neglect the contributions by peripheral cultures (usually when written by a single author), or they include presentations of the less important musical nations in separate chapters with the effect that they are often regarded as unrelated to the main developments (which often occurs in works written by several specialists).

Such problems are avoided in reference books as their editors do not have to deal with one hypercomplex whole — the universal history of music — but generally achieve objective presentation of the main processes and exemplary individuals in a number of separate entries. When the task is taken seriously (as in The New Grove Dictionary or Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart) the results are significant and these volumes are therefore valued more highly than general histories of music by authors from small musical cultures. Almost all of these entries are written by authors from the very nations whose achievements are being discussed and consequently their objectivity can sometimes be called into question. It is the responsibility of editors to intervene if necessary and correct or shorten the articles sent to them.

It is important for small musical nations to be allotted as much space as possible in international dictionaries and this is often a source of rivalry among them. The paper will discuss the example of the former Yugoslavia, and analyze how the musical cultures of its various constituent nations have been represented in two successive editions of The Grove Dictionary, 1980 and 2001, with the regard to the tragic dissolution of the country in the intervening years.

Stefan Morent (Universtät Tübingen), Viewing the past: Differing concepts of early music history in 19th-century Germany and France.

The 19th century is commonly seen as the beginning of history writing in a modern sense. This is also true for the writing of music history: Replacing the idea of a everlasting progress of music by a profound skepticism toward contemporary music in certain fields, 19th-century writers on music history rediscovered early music as a music in its own rights. As a reaction against Enlightenment, rationalism, and secularization, and inspired by the leading ideas of Romanticism and historicism, early music, and in particular medieval music, is conceived as a remedy for the contemporary situation. While this scenario applies for both Germany and France, the individual shaping of this "restoration" movement reveals considerable differences between the two countries.

In Germany early music in first place served and was shaped as an ideal for the creation of a "true" and "pure" church music, equally pursued by Protestant (Thibaut) and Catholic (Witt, Haberl) musicians and music historians. Setting Palestrina and the Medicea edition of Gregorian chant as an absolute ideal, and in doing so applying a rather rigid concept of music history, the "Caecilian" movement however easily led to dogmaticism and to separation from the compositional development outside of church music.

The situation in France differs in that the original form of Gregorian chant (and its accompaniment) as well as the creation of genuine French music plays a most prominent role. Early music is seen as the source for a national music, responding to and defeating the overwhelming influence of Wagner’s works. Although the Benedictine monks of Solesmes (Pothier, Mocquereau) play a crucial role in this process, the rediscovery of early music in France is not confined to church music but paralleled by a much broader movement of "archéologie musicale", creating the foundations of modern music scholarship (Charles Bordes). This leads to a more open attitude and a direct influence on contemporary composers, most of them (such as Fauré, Debussy or Satie) having been in touch with one of the Parisian institutions (École Choron, École Niedermeyer, Schola Cantorum) teaching church music and music history but — significantly enough — no longer run by the church.

David L. Mosley (Bellarmine University, Louisville, Kentucky), The Advantages and Disadvantages of Music for Life: Composing an Untimely History of Music.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s untimely meditation "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life" for writers in the areas of philosophy of history and historiography; yet in the many contemporary readings of this essay its prophetic observations about the dangers attendant to a surfeit of history have received far more attention than its propaedeutic instructions for achieving an untimely relation to the past. Even Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to history, in many ways the most faithful to the second untimely meditation, seems vulnerable to the Nietzschean caricature of historical virtuosity in which the accrual of observations overwhelm the human impulses out of which culture arises. Likewise, the so-called new musicology, which owes much to Foucault’s genealogical attitude, is similarly susceptible to the same characterization. What is yet to be taken seriously, however, in Nietzsche’s foray into the philosophy of history is the crucial role played by musical practice, as both metaphor and exemplar, in the construction of a history in the service of life. The first portion of this presentation will concern itself with an explication of this aspect of the essay, with special attention to Nietzsche’s dilated understanding of Stimmung as a musical phenomenon, diagnostic tool, existential state, and historical criterion.

The second portion of the presentation will address Nietzsche’s own personal history with music and how an untimely history of music might be composed according to Nietzsche’s guidelines. As a competent pianist and would-be composer, Nietzsche is among the most musically literate of philosophers. His various musical encounters, including the attempt to selectively forget and consequently overcome his early enthusiasm for Richard Wagner’s music dramas, were of crucial importance to Nietzsche’s life and thought. Do not all of us compose personally significant histories of music in which various works resonate with one another and, at the same time, speak to us and for us in a supra-historical or fashion? Similarly, are there not certain musical expressions we need to overcome? If this is so in the personal realm, might it also the case in the academic sphere? It was Nietzsche’s contention that such an untimely relation to the past enabled the transformation of cultural understanding into a new way of living free from the identity of a latecomer and immune to crippling effects of ironic self-awareness.

The paper investigates the discourse on gender studies in the present-day German musicology. Following Foucault’s understanding of discourse, it will be analyzed how gender studies (in its broadest definition: from women’s studies to queer studies) is looked at in a country where (according to Anselm Gerhard) musicology is (for historical reasons) considered a “verspätete Disziplin” (“belated discipline”). As much as concepts of “new musicology“ and musicology as part of the cultural studies field became part of the academic canon in the United States, German musicology seems reluctant to appreciate other approaches to music than the traditional ones.
Is there a difference between women’s studies and gender studies in German musicology today? How can one identify the place where gender studies fits into today’s and tomorrow’s German musicology discourse? Who is in charge of decisions, who takes part in them, and who is left out? What are the major tasks in research for the years to come and how can/must the approach be different compared to the ‘old’ “new musicology” in the U.S. and in Central Europe?

On the basis of analyzing both Internet sources and recent relevant publications the status quo of German musicology and gender studies reflects a discourse specific to the country where the origins of the discipline are rooted. Not only do we learn about the specific approach to the given topic but the analysis also reflects on the situation of German musicology in general.

Every musical adaptation of a literary work has to be considered as an exercise of perception and interpretation that provides additional information on the hermeneutics of a writer’s works. These adaptations allow us to understand and explain how the literary work has been recreated and transformed in each epoch. Once a play or a novel has been put in music, every musical version offers the audience a sort of critical and at the same time musical thought that reflects a new conception — even misconception — of the work. Cervantes’s works have provided composers with excellent material for their musical compositions and this fact has to be taken into account to describe the process of his musical reception: how the characters and the episodes of his works have been selected by composers and perceived by the audience and what kind of musical treatment each composer provides.
At the same time, there cannot be any doubt that Cervantes’s works reflect faithfully the Spanish musical world of the 16th and 17th centuries: musical instruments, dances and bailes, romances and songs are often cited and performed in his pages in order to depict not only a special and picturesque environment in which his characters evolve — such as a Gypsy world in La gitanilla or Muslim’s traditions in La gran sultana or Los baños de Argel — but in addition assign a particular semantic value to each musical element adding a supplementary meaning to the work’s understanding.

One of the most striking examples comes from the literary relationship between Garcilaso de la Vega and Cervantes. Garcilaso was one of the most important Spanish Renaissance poets whose music was set in the 16th century by composers of polyphony, such as Pedro and Francisco Guerrero. The paper will explain how Don Quixote’s author borrowed lyrical texts from Garcilaso’s works and made his characters sing them in different literary contexts (Don Quijote, La Galatea, some dramatic works). This process of literary writing can be illustrated by examples from Don Quijote I, XXV; II XVIII; El amante Liberal; Persiles, II, XV, La Galatea V, La guarda cuidadosa. Understanding Cervantes’s works as a source for music history we could also compare the structure of the original Garcilaso’s poems; their transformation in Mudarra’s compositions; and examine how they were adapted and changed by Cervantes using the irony as literary technique.

Led since 1963 by the conductor Marin Constantin, the national chamber choir of Romania, Madrigal, has received international acclaim for performing a wide repertoire, ranging from Renaissance works and 20th-century avant-garde compositions to Romanian folk songs and colinde (the Romanian Christmas caroling genre). Madrigal holds a unique place in Romanian music history, remaining the officially recognized national chamber choir of Romania from the communist era to the present day. However, a reassessment of the political contexts within which colinde were performed by Madrigal suggests that a rewriting of Romanian music history might be necessary in order to address the manner in which Madrigal was used to promote a national image abroad that often contradicted with policies within Romania. During the communist era, for example, Madrigal had special license from the Romanian government to perform colinde as music representative of Romania’s religious tolerance on the international concert stage at a time when the genre was heavily censored from public performance, due to its religious content, within the country itself. Denied official circulation within Romania, Madrigal’s recordings were then broadcast illegally by the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Since then, Madrigal’s performances of colinde have continued to be used as political symbols, perhaps most strikingly as they were selected to accompany televised broadcasts of the violent revolution of December 1989, and to support international outreach for the past 15 years. Despite such powerful political resonance, or perhaps because of it, very little has been said or written about the dissemination of Madrigal’s colinde performances. These blurred, but vitally important pages of Romanian music history are a key for understanding of the changing significance of colinde in contemporary society and the shifting course of ethnomusicology in postrevolutionary Romania.

Sanna Pederson (University of Oklahoma), An early crusader for music as culture: Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

The professor and popular writer Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-97) is almost completely forgotten by musicology today. His work deserves renewed attention in light of the recent prominence of ethnomusicology and cultural studies in scholarly approaches to music.

Riehl lectured on cultural history at the University of Munich, where he helped establish folklore studies (Volkskunde) as an academic field. Although not professionally trained in music, he wrote extensively about the social significance of music making. He argued for an approach that treated music history as cultural history. He criticized music histories centered on great composers and instead recounted the overlooked achievements of lesser-known musicians (Musikalische Charakterköpfe, first published in 1853) and the vanishing musical traditions in agrarian areas of Germany (Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, 1858).

Riehl advocated a more inclusive cultural approach that appreciated the unsung heroes and everyday life of the past. He was much more critical of his own time, lamenting the costs of transforming Germany into a modern industrial society. Similarly, while he called for a more encompassing definition of Germany’s musical heritage, he rejected all "modern" music. Although best known for his polemics against Wagner’s "music of the future", he was in fact unable to endorse any contemporary music except his own Hausmusik (1855), a collection of simple Lieder intended for family use.

Riehl, therefore, is an ambiguous figure: he championed music as culture in researching the collective music of the German Volk, but he also explicitly rejected a future for music as art with a negative view of music professionals and the institutions of art music. This paper weighs different perspectives on Riehl and suggests that by studying his work we can more thoughtfully consider current debates about cultural studies and music.

For the founding fathers of musicology, biography belonged to the margins of the discipline. Biography was primarily to serve the purpose of establishing the chronology of the subject’s life and works; sometimes also to explain compositions that were perceived as misfits in a composer’s artistic development, as with Beethoven’s late works.

This attitude to biography reflected specific views on the authorship and the nature of the creative process; scientific standards in the humanities at the end of the nineteenth century and an ambiguous status of biography as a scientific enterprise; and a predominant view that a scholarly interpretation of music should not be contaminated by contextual inferences, including biographical. To make biography compatible with the scientific method, musicologists embraced the idea that biographical facts can speak for themselves and therefore establishing facts, not their critical interpretation, was the proper purpose of a scholarly endeavor. In effect, collections of documents (documentary biography) and monumental, multi-volume biographies, where available evidence was presented in chronological order, were expected to best render the biographical truth. The 19th-century paradigm of humanistic knowledge influenced musical biography much more than it influenced any other genre of historical writing. A view of biography as a cumulative rather than an interpretative project dies hard among musicologists.

However, the changes that musicology has experienced for a few decades now, including the expansion of its subject matter and the revision of its methodologies, open up new perspectives for biography. This paper will highlight the role of of biography in the history of musical scholarship and discuss its present condition within musicology.

Lóránt Péteri (University of Bristol), God and revolution: Rewriting the absolute ― Bence Szabolcsi and the discourse of Hungarian musical life 1950-55.

The case of musicologist Bence Szabolcsi (1899-1973) reveals the different ways in which the writing of music history can be instrumental in the affirmation of a politically established canon. As a leading scholar in interwar Hungary, Szabolcsi was inspired by Geistesgeschichte and by Zoltán Kodály’s ideas regarding the close links between the research of folk music and that of music history. In the first years following the communist takeover, Szabolcsi’s status was ambiguous, but by 1951, as the president of the Magyar Zeneművészek Szövetsége, he had become a figurehead of the country’s Stalinist musical life. From 1950 onwards, Szabolcsi’s writings on music history were integral parts of discourses on music. His earlier view of art music as based on folk and popular genres was accommodated in post-Zhdanovian musical thinking. Szabolcsi’s approach to history was the transformation of his religious, teleological Weltanschauung. In this model a concept of "classicism" was seen as the aesthetic projection of God and the Absolute. After 1950, this understanding was transformed in a particular way. Substituting God with revolution on the one hand, and the alliance with God with that of "the people" on the other, Szabolcsi’s earlier system of beliefs was henceforth instrumental in confirming the proper order of discourses about history of music, and was assimilated in the teleological elements of the communist (Marxist) ideology.

Robert Philip (The Open University, UK), Becoming historically informed by recordings.

The idea of "historically informed performance" has become so entrenched in modern musical thinking that it could be regarded as the predominant orthodoxy for the performance of music of the past. It grew out the study of written texts and instruments: This was the "history" by which performers were to become "informed". But there is a different history of which performers and scholars are slowly becoming aware, and that is performances themselves, preserved in recordings over more than a hundred years. Until recently, historical recordings were dismissed as having little or nothing to teach us about performing the music of the past, because it was assumed that our greater knowledge of historical sources must make our performances better informed, and therefore better as performances. But scholars are now beginning to understand that historical recordings are important primary sources for the study of performance practice, and provide a valuable critique of modern developments in performance. What do they have to teach us about the shifting sands of "historical awareness"?

In order to examine some of the issues that recordings raise, this paper will focus on two composer-pianists, Mozart and Rachmaninoff. Modern musicians rely on scholars to inform them about how Mozart might have played. By contrast, the music of Rachmaninoff is approached directly without the intervention of scholars, and Rachmaninoff himself left his own recordings of how he actually did play. Are we better off in the latter case than in the former? Do we get any "nearer" to Rachmaninoff than we do to Mozart? If we had recordings of Mozart, as we have of Rachmaninoff, how might we use them?

Antoni Pizà (Foundation for Iberian Music, The City University of New York Graduate Center), The artist as a critic: The writings of Joaquín Nin Castellanos.

Besides being a composer and a virtuoso performer, Joaquín Nin Castellanos (Havana, 29 September 1879 — Havana, 24 October 1949) was a prolific writer on music. (Writing, as a matter of fact, seems to be a family tradition. His father had been a polemicist writer and his daughter Anaïs Nin became a very successful, albeit controversial, writer as well.) During the first decade of the 20th century, Nin Castellanos was the Paris correspondent of the musical journal La revista musical catalana. He also contributed to Le monde musical of Paris (as their Berlin correspondent), Bulletin français de la SIM, Guide musical de Bruxelles, and Conservatorio of Havana. In addition, he published the books Pro arte e ideas y comentarios, In the Service of Art, Idées et commentaires, and Huit anneés d’action musical. His writings show the typical preoccupations of most music makers of the 20th century, namely: the avant-garde, musical nationalism, and the rise of "early" music.

Heather Platt (Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana), Hugo Wolf and the “evolution” of the lied.

Music histories typically portray Wolf as representing the pinnacle of the nineteenth-century lied: he is reported as forging a much higher union of text and music than previous composers, and is lauded for his close readings of the original poems. For these achievements he is juxtaposed with Schubert and Brahms who set poets of lesser rank and occasionally ignored structural details of the poems in part because of their reliance on strophic and strophic variation forms. A closer examination of Wolf’s lieder, however, reveals not only oversights in declamation, but also the use of musical schemes that similarly involved repeated segments of music that were not instigated by the text. Some of the flaws in Wolf’s settings have been noted in specialized books and articles (for example those by Alan Walker and Susan Youens), but the implications of Wolf’s steadily increasing reliance on traditional song forms have not been fully explored. Moreover, textbooks and general histories of music still emphasize Wolf’s through-composed works and ignore instances where he manipulated the poem for the sake of the music. This championing of Wolf is due to historians imposing a teleological view on the nineteenth-century lied, whereas the genre is better understood as a constant tension between poetry and music.

Sindhumathi K. Revuluri (Princeton University), Harmonizing the past.

The French fascination with the exotic permeated musical production at the dawn of the 20th century. References to distant foreign others run rampant in every musical genre of the period. More than a trend, exoticism bordered on an obsession, and its persistent presence deeply influenced the turn of the French musical language towards modernism. This moment in history provided a unique opportunity for actual contact with the music of these faraway cultures. Ironically, just as the presence of large numbers of foreign visitors to French soil through the Expositions Universelles inspired their subsequent representation in French music, it also coincided with endeavors to find and preserve their own national treasures: French folksongs from every province. These songs, once collected, were often harmonized and sold as sheet music. Surprisingly, the harmonizations betray the songs’ melodic and formal simplicity, providing unconventional progressions and unexpected chords and cadences. Though contemporary transcriptions of exotic musics reveal tendencies to make the foreign familiar (sometimes through sleights of notation), these folksongs were simultaneous attempts to de-familiarize a national musical past — to make the familiar, strange. By harmonizing seemingly simple folksongs in unconventional ways, French composers, critics, and budding ethnomusicologists became agents in a larger project of imperial assertion. On the one hand, they offered new complexity to their own musical past; on the other, they simply made their past match their present, and future, modernist musical language. I will examine French folksongs, collected and harmonized by Vincent d’Indy, Gustave Charpentier, and others. The paper will consider the harmonies used to paint a musically complex popular past, and in so doing, will show that the French fascination with the exotic was not limited to foreign others.

Cécile Reynaud (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la musique), The judgment of Paris: The evaluations made by the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the works sent from Rome by the prize-winning composers.

From its establishment in the 17th century, the Prix de Rome made it possible for the French government to send the country’s finest artists to Italy, in order to copy there the sculptural and architectural monuments of antiquity and the pictorial works of more recent Italian masters, and subsequently to return home with renewed savoir faire. The competition was originally limited to painters, sculptors, and architects. At the beginning of the 19th century, musicians were added to the mix, as the “Grand Prix de composition musicale” was established in 1803. Like their fellow artists, composers had to follow a strict set of rules and procedures. Among other things, during their sojourn in Italy they were required to complete a certain number of obligatory works, which were then submitted for evaluation to the same panel that had judged the original competition: the members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France. The Académie then formally recorded assessments of the works completed in Rome by all prizewinners, some of whom, among them Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, and Lili Boulanger, later became famous.

These collected assessments thus now constitute an important source for our understanding of the criteria upon which judgments of musical value were made, of the true meaning of “bien composer”, throughout the 19th century. The two principal criteria upon which the Académie traditionally acted were, first, the manner in which the student had imitated the models found in Italy (a criterion not readily applied in music), and, second, the manner in which the student had achieved artistic expression.

In this paper I propose to analyze the evaluations made by the Académie of the works sent from Rome by the prizewinning composers evaluations that have never been studied in a systematic way in order to arrive at a synoptic view of what constituted “official taste” in the field of music in the 19th century, and to compare these evaluations to those pronounced by the judges upon the works sent from Rome by the painters, sculptors, and architects.

Whether music incorporates, or reflects, or merely refers to “the literary” — and vice versa — has long been debated. Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, more or less careful parallels were frequently drawn (or rejected) between the forms and contents of individual symphonic compositions, on the one hand, and a variety of poems and prose tales, on the other. Liszt, Richard Strauss, and other composers cited literary “classics” in the titles of their works and even published excerpts in their scores. As a consequence, certain critics came out in favor of musical programmism and the “extra-musical”; other critics (Eduard Hanslick comes quickly to mind) advocated musical “absolutism”. These, less structurally focused discussions of extra-musical expression in tone, however, have been amplified more recently by suggestions that certain works of fiction themselves employ familiar musical structural principles, especially sonata form. The present author, for instance, has “read” Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus in terms of Beethoven’s C-minor sonata, op. 111, while Robert K. Wallace has “read” several of Jane Austen’s novels in terms of Mozart concerto movements. These readers suggest new ways of understanding musical form by examining how it function outside music itself. Mutatis mutandis, deconstructive criticism of literary works suggests new ways in which musicologists might acquire a deeper understanding of such metastructural issues as musical representations of gender, the extent to which instrumental compositions may be said to embody “character” (and in what ways they may embody it), and the overall problem of music and narrativity.

Ranking in its well-known and ambitious scope of concerns from opera to dance, and theater to symphony, the creative life of musicians and performing artists in early 20th-century Russia emerged in pursuit of what might be called a new vision of melos — the nation that linear-informed constructs of quality and function are at the root of collectively structures “sonority”. While seminal in the history of Russian music, especially in its modernist manifestations, the development of this burgeoning aesthetic experienced severe setback under Soviet rule: despite its theoretical advancement in the writing of Boris Asaf’ev (1884-1943), the function of its test-case “resonator” — the Russian choral ensemble — was deprived of a traditional creative role. For reasons of ideology, the latter could no longer be the stimulus of new compositions for the “laboratory” of the cathedral church.

The paper will examine a series of publications whose aim is to provide a fresh glimpse into the unique milieu that gave birth to the so-called “new Russian school” of choral composition. The decades just prior to the revolution in 1917 were epic in witnessing the prolific output of masters such as Pavel Chesnokov (1877-1944), Aleksandr Grechaninov (1864-1956), Nikolai Kompaneisky (1848-1910), Viktor Kalinnikov (1870-1927), Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1944), Aleksandr Kastalsky (1856-1926) and others. Attempts to recapture the spirit of this bygone musical culture have been fraught with difficulties in recent years. The best proof is in the abundance of ill-conceived recording projects by Russian choral groups intending to launch the music for the international listenership, including many virtually unknown masterpieces still awaiting an authoritative first-reading. What is likely to be the role of historical research in setting this record straight? The question will be raised in respect to a monumental series of publications initiated in recent years by the musicologists Nadezhda Kabanova, Aleksei Naumov, Marina Rahmanova, and Svetlana Zvereva [Russkaja duhovna muzyka v dokumentak i materialak (Moskow, 1998), vol. 1 and subsequent volumes].

Peter J. Schmelz (State University of New York at Buffalo), Penetrating nostalgia: Memory and the (re-)writing of Soviet music history.

During the Soviet period Kremlin watchers were forced to rely almost entirely on the official version of events, reading the tea leaves of surface comings and goings in an attempt to decipher the internal mysteries of the closed system. Western music scholars were no exception, forced to relay the official compositions, concerts, and congresses reported in official journals like Sovetskaja muzyka. The one-sided nature of the resulting narratives has only gradually been redressed in the post-Soviet era. Now in a postcommunist world, researchers are faced with new opportunities yet must still confront lingering biases and lingering lacunae. As this paper will discuss, my own research into the unofficial Soviet music composed during Khrushchev’s thaw enabled me to attempt a broader portrait of Soviet musical life, one that benefited from the freedoms permitted scholars today while more fully acknowledging the complexities of the communist past.

Historians of the Soviet period have turned increasingly to firsthand testimony, primarily diary entries and letters, to supplement the official version of events from the early decades of the U.S.S.R. With the recent past, the historian is now in the more enviable position of literally engaging in a dialogue with participants, in my case with the composers, performers and listeners of the 1960s, all of whom provided a crucial window into the musical events that took place at the hazy margins of Soviet musical life. These informants are an invaluable and disappearing resource, but one that also comes at a price, as current concerns and the vagaries of memory tinge their recollections of the past. Due to the frustratingly incomplete recent holdings of Soviet archives, many of their memories are unverifiable, or are verifiable only with reference to the ostensibly suspect official press, which proved more reliable than a Westerner might have initially expected. Furthermore, it quickly became clear that in writing the history of the 1950s and 1960s with the assistance of Russian informants, I was simultaneously writing the story of the late 1990s, as their clear nostalgia for the Soviet Union of their youth betrayed widespread dissatisfaction with the current state of Russian society, still stumbling through its first post-Soviet decade. All of these issues have ramifications beyond Soviet music and compel us to consider larger questions concerning the ethical roles and expectations of the music historian, and, more pointedly, the competing claims of the harmoniously monologic past and the often discordantly polyphonic present.

David Schneider (Amherst College) “What is Hungarian?”: Views of Hungarian music in Hungarian and English music dictionaries 1879-2001.

In 1939 Hungarian historian Gyula Szekfû (1883-1955) brought the question “What is Hungarian?” to the front lines of scholarly debate in Hungary by asking a group of leading intellectuals to address the question for each of their fields. Zoltán Kodály’s essay Magyarság a zenében (Hungarianness in music) attempts to answer the question for music in part by sharply contrasting German musical taste with Hungarian — a rhetorical move with a specific political motivation in the late 1930s. Although different in terms of their political agendas, entries related to Hungarian music in the 1931, 1965 and 1979 editions of the Zenei Lexikon (Musical dictionary) are similarly identifiable with contemporaneous political concerns. Beginning with the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary in 1878-90, English-language dictionaries have provided less politically charged entries on Hungarian music. The difference between foreign and domestic conceptions of Hungarian music persists in related entries even after Hungarian scholars were enlisted to author “Hungary” in Grove 6 (1980). This paper analyzes the evolving domestic and foreign conceptions of Hungarian music between 1879 and 2001 through comparison of entries on Hungary and Hungarian music.

Nico Schüler(Texas State University), Riemann’s Musiklexikon as a mirror of German music history.

Like most other music dictionaries, Riemann’s Musiklexikon is largely a display of the history of music composition, not of music reception. However, two distinctive characteristics can be observed: It has a "national" identity, in that it contains more entries on German composers than on composers from other countries; and for each edition the author or editors reevaluated the "fame" of composers to justify an entry. This conference paper is based on comparative studies, considering all editions of Riemann’s Musiklexikon, from the first, published in 1882, through the twelfth, published in 1959-75 (including the Ergänzungsbände). The paper will present the results of some of the comparisons, showing (1) at which time in history (in the various editions) a composer’s name appears or disappears as an entry; (2) the dictionary’s national character, by presenting selected results of comparisons with dictionaries from the U.S.; and (3) that the dictionary can tell relatively little about the reception history of music. The latter point is substantiated with results of newspaper research on the reception history of the music dating from around 1920; this newspaper research is compared to the ninth (1919), tenth (1922), and eleventh (1929) editions of Riemann’s dictionary.

Luana Stan (University of Paris IV Sorbonne / University of Montreal), Constructing image and identity policies: Local and global in Romanian musicology after the Second World War.

The failure of communism and the opening toward the West have determined a strong need of identification in contemporary Romanian musicology. The deconstruction of the false image imposed by the constraints of the totalitarian regime and the reconstruction of an identity have generated tendencies to assimilate other values, former nostalgias and strategies of resistance, and the search for the "origin" sources. At the same time, in the West, the image of Romania and its composers and musicologists has been modified according to the sources available to musical research as well as — perhaps in a greater measure — the country’s social and political situation. Whilst in Romania the image of musicological research is rigorously constructed, in Western Europe that image has lost its consistency, acquiring the features of a "marginal", "minor" culture, and in North America it appears as something "exotic", "interesting" but ambiguous.

This need for identification of the Romanian musicologists is perceived very clearly from debates in the works in this field from as far back as the beginning of the 20th century. In 1920 a great inquiry in the magazine Muzica, released in Bucharest, had as a goal the consolidation of the idea of "national school"; we will encounter the same type of inquiries later on, in a period of "openings" toward the West (1965, 1968), after the fall of the totalitarian regime (1990), and at the beginning of the 21st century (2001-2002). Some Romanian composers and musicologists living in the West helped with creating a positive image of their native country (especially of the musical trends with which they were directly implicated), and with the integration of the tendencies of those countries using the Romanian elements as an "exotic" argument.

Once postmodernism appeared, an effort was made in musicological discourse to eliminate the supremacy of ethnocentrism, the cultural hierarchism, preferring a globally homogenized vision of musical phenomena. We will try to project a more objective image of Romanian musical identity, weighing on the one hand (from the inside) the possibility of domestic cultural representation, founded sometimes on a terminology parallel to the one accepted by the West, and, on the other hand (from the outside) the differences, the similarities, and the integrations of these streams in Western general musicology.

The Croatian-American scholar Dragan Plamenac (1895-1983) belongs to the generation of great musicologists who enabled the heritage of early European music to be studied and performed, and his edition of Ockeghem’s Masses and of the Codex Faenza ensured his long-lasting international recognition. However, he accomplished also some important research on music in Croatia and published several editions of Croatian music. He was the first to draw the attention of the international musicological community to some of the most representative musical monuments of the Renaissance and Baroque music in Croatia, and his scholarly work ensured that Croatia ceased to be terra incognita on the map of early European music.

Agamemnon Tentes (Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen), Historicizing a Great Theory of Music.

Chrysanthos divided his Theōrītikon mega tīs mousikīs (Great Theory of Music; published in Trieste, 1832) into parts on “theoretical and practical music” and “narration on the origin and evolution of music”. Thus, he discussed music both as an achronic idea and as a movement in time (in chronological time and in rhythmical time). Chrysanthos’s conceptualization of time in music, which dates from about twenty years before the publication of the treatise, was the most celebrated aspect of his musical reform, which led to a “new method of transmission” of the Hellenic ecclesiastical music. The writing of the Theōrītikon mega tīs mousikīs, together with his appointment as teacher of music theory in the subsequent patriarchal School of Music in Istanbul, established him as one of the founders of new Hellenic ecclesiastical music.

My narrative will attempt a critical presentation of the concepts of music and history and their interactive transformations through the time of the Theōrītikon mega tīs mousikīs. Moreover, by playing on the writer’s multinational references to European, Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian music (reaching America as well), as counter subjects to his fugal subject, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s concept of music, I intend to propose interdisciplinary preconditions of approaching sources both as lenses focused on the worlds within them and as mirrors reflecting the scholarly self. This could offer the opportunity to reflect on the 2005 First Conference of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale as a field of discourse on music’s intellectual history.

A taxonomy of aesthetic concerns in La Revue musicale under the direction of Henry Prunières.

Numerous aesthetic concerns mark the course of La Revue musicale during the twenty years during which Henry Prunières served as Editor-in-Chief. These themes shape the theoretical space against which music is considered. While these aesthetic concerns certainly correspond with the context of the era, they also reflect a widening set of interests. As a result, concurrent with technical progress and the development of scientific knowledge, aesthetic questions turn to “the foreign” as well as to the problems inherent to all art forms. In other words, La Revue musicale of this era constantly strives to contextualize music within a broader space of considerations. There is also a push to pique readers’ curiosity about issues beyond the realm of French music – amongst others, these include Viennese and Russian musicians, as well as jazz, Islamic and African music.

The present discussion seeks to establish a taxonomy of the types of aesthetic concerns addressed in La Revue Musicale and to examine the motivations behind them. First, we will outline three general categories of aesthetic concerns: those surrounding extra-musical topics, those involving epistemological topics, and topics dealing with the musical language proper. For each of these categories, representative examples will be presented. For the category of extra-musical concerns, for example, the relationship between music and the other arts, as well as issues of an ethnomusicological nature will constitute entire sub-categories. Following this, we will consider the general context of the era in order to properly situate the aesthetic concerns of La Revue musicale and to understand their underlying motivations. From there, the discussion will move to a reflection on outside factors that could explain the widening of aesthetic concerns. The advance of scientific knowledge, increased cosmopolitanism due to new modes of transportation, and the wars of the twentieth century will all be considered with an eye to establishing a correspondence between aesthetic concerns and the attributes of the era. In conclusion, questions about the aesthetic contribution of La Revue Musicale, as well as the renewal brought about by its diversity of aesthetic concerns will be discussed and considered in the light of the context of the era of the musical history of the first half of the twentieth century.

Sue Tuohy (Indiana University), Chinese national music scholarship and its intersections with the intellectual history of ethnomusicology.

Music scholarship in China was conducted with little reference to or within European and North America scholarly writing until the late 19th century. In the 20th century, however, the development of a modern Chinese music scholarship coincided with increased scholarly links between China and the West, from European models of disciplinarity to the more recent Chinese sponsorship of international music conferences. This paper explores the intellectual history of music scholarship in mainland China and its intersections with music scholarship internationally, focusing on the study of topics often falling under the rubric of ethnomusicology: folk music, relations between music and culture, and ethnographic research.

Many scholars date the beginning of modern music scholarship to the early 20th century, when Chinese scholars put forth the call to "learn from the West" (Wong 1991). One initial lesson was the potential use of scholarship to promote nationalism. Chinese national music scholarship thus was simultaneously bound up in an international context and in nationalist ideologies and purposes. This two-pronged approach, looking toward the "foreign" for models and emphasizing "native" intellectual traditions, will be explored through an examination of Chinese conferences, journals, and reference works. The Chinese case also provides another opportunity to reassess the concept of national music scholarship and the potential for rewriting the history of "music scholarship" to incorporate scholarly traditions left out of our received histories of ethnomusicology.

JoAnn Udovich (Fairfield, Penn.), Max Weber’s essay on the foundations of music in American perspective.

Max Weber’s Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik has received, since its publication in 1921, some attention among European commentators on music, even as it stands as a minor and overlooked work within Weber’s oeuvre. Among American scholars, however, the essay has received virtually no attention, except for a translation into English in the 1950s. This paper considers Weber’s essay on music in the context of European and American experiences of class, a prevailing concern in Weberian thought.

The reception of Weber’s oeuvre as a whole remains difficult terrain. Since Weber lacked an established academic position, much of his work was not published in his lifetime. Despite the huge bibliography that has accumulated around Weber’s thought, a collected edition of Weber’s writings, fraught with editorial difficulties, is only now in progress, and the first definitive biography (in English, by the historian of the European university, Fritz Ringer) is scheduled for publication late in 2004. Further complicating matters, Weber’s reception in the United States has taken a completely different path from that in Europe. American acquaintance with Weber’s writings dates to the 1930s and 1940s when émigré scholars from Europe brought Weber’s writings and ideas with them (along with musicology) as they took positions in American universities. Translations beginning with those of Harvard’s Talcott Parsons lead to a particularly American interpretation of Weber’s thoughts on bureaucracy.

In the final analysis, Weber’s essay points away from the periodization and style analysis that has dominated writing on music history in the last century. Furthermore, the essay offers a model for integrating ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and sociological and humanistic approaches to the subject. The highly touted "death" of classical music has more to do with contrasting and changing social structures than with music itself.

Cristina Urchueguía (Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Institut, Göttingen), The making of German "Klassik": Politics, Textkritik and Bach.

Germany, the "land of poets and thinkers", had fifteen minutes of its intellectual glory during the first half of the 19th century, although the country as a nation did not exist until 1871. And not only its density of intellectual and artistic activity — let us just mention names like Goethe, Beethoven, Humboldt, Grimm — but also the consciousness of political and social relevance implicit to the work of all writers, scholars, musicians, and philosophers which characterize this moment in the history of the German-speaking region. The birth of German textual criticism (Textkritik), Karl Lachmann being its prolific midwife, and the birth of music scholarship, both scientific and critical, belong to this dynamic as a part of the process of constituting national identity. The making to the text and the making of the nation go hand in hand.

In my paper I will do an analysis of the relationship between the creation of Karl Lachmann’s methods of textual criticism taking as example an edition of Bible and of Nibelungensklage, and the evolution of textual criticism of music taking the J.S. Bach edition as a paradigm and Johann Nikolaus Forkel as its precursor. The political evolution of the time in Europe functions as omnipresent framework for this analysis.

It seems self-evident that humanism should frame our studies of music. After all, in the contemporary university, music is part of the humanities, and, indeed, from the very outset, music was an integral part of the studia humanitatis. Yet as we all know, before the Renaissance, music’s disciplinary assignment had been to the quadrivium of mathematical sciences, and it continued to be considered a part of mathematics even after the advent of humanism.

This paper argues that humanistic inquiries and methods have drastically limited our understanding of music in early modern cultures. By taking music to operate as a form of rhetoric or oratory—that is, by relocating music from the quadrivium to the trivium—historians have tended to downplay the Aristotelian tradition in favor of a neo-Platonic one, to say nothing of ignoring the importance of music to religious cultures and early modern cultures of the body.

Why historians have insisted on humanism is, I believe, a more complex matter than simply the inheritance of divisional pigeonholes in the modern university system. It has to do with the peculiar hermeticism of music itself, and the nineteenth-century origins of musicology and Renaissance historiography.

Andreas Vejvar (Universität Mozarteum, Salzburg), Constructing music history in a novel: Alejo Carpentier’s conception of "threnody".

Regarding music’s intellectual history, belletristic works should not be neglected. In our context, Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) is an interesting figure, because he did not only write as a music critic and musicologist, but also as a novelist. The challenge for Carpentier — well known as the author of La música en Cuba (1946) and famous as the "inventor" of the "real maravilloso americano" as a concept in writing novels — in his Los pasos perdidos is mainly to present the origin of music in the so-called "threnody" with certain intentions and consequences.

Music is important in nearly all of his novels, as can be easily demonstrated with El acoso (with relations to a Beethoven symphony) or El concierto barocco (with a fictitious symposium of Händel, Scarlatti, and Vivaldi held in Venice). The paper will show how a music scholar and professor of cultural history constructs history in a novel with a musicologist as the protagonist. The programmatic real magic in The Lost Steps is the evoked "orphic" effect of the lament called "threnody" as the novel’s nucleus: to raise from the dead. In order to authenticate the still alive orphic effect, Carpentier embodies the origin of music in the Venezuelan jungle. The medicine man’s lament, according to a postscript to the novel, has been recorded and archived; nevertheless, Carpentier’s interpretation of "threnody" is much more orientated by an Old World author like Hermann Broch and his Tod des Vergil than by the concrete New World’s conception of the lament with the purpose to forget the beloved dead ones (according to ethnologists, dealing with the tribe mentioned by Carpentier).

Two criteria are necessary for the existence of a historical approach in the area of artistic production. The first is formal: music history would begin with the recognition of the principle and the application of a method that would permit giving the manifestations of musical creation a network of references in time and space. This has existed since the 15th and 16th centuries when some writers became conscious of the importance of artistic creation in music history. These first histories, although summary, nonetheless rest upon fundamental principles of a truly historical spirit. A second substantial criterion is based on the opposition between normative and historical discourses. In the manner of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Zarlino, as early as the first version of his Istitutioni harmoniche (1558), proposed dividing all theoretical study of music into two parts: history and method. Method consists of the study of sounding bodies, the science of sounds that in the 18th century Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716) would christen acoustics. History refers to the study of sounding bodies through its manifestations in the writing and interpretation of works composed during different periods. These writings and interpretations are approached thanks to the study of historical sources according to the principles of textual analysis defined by the humanists.
My work proposes to elucidate the positioning of historical discourse on music during the Renaissance based on the precepts mentioned above and on both known sources (Tinctoris) and unknown sources (Gaetano).

The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1798-1848) has been widely recognized as an important source of critical writings and of correspondence detailing the musical life of European cities in the early 19th century. This paper will suggest that the AmZ should also be taken seriously as the prototype of a modern musicology journal.

Most issues of the AmZ contain extended essays, variously titled Abhandlungen, Theoretische Aufsätze, Biographische Nachrichten, etc., that cover a surprisingly wide range of topics. A tabulation of approximately 250 such contributions from the first eight volumes of the AmZ, covering the years from 1898 to 1806, shows that about three quarters of them can be assigned to one of several large categories, corresponding to virtually all of the major concerns of modern music scholarship. These are biography (44 contributions), music history (13), music theory (20), aesthetics (19), performance practice (27), music education (12), structure and design of instruments (21), national and folk music (15), medical issues (5), and the relationship between music and the other arts (6).
Although these writings obviously do not have the methodological sophistication of more recent scholarship, they show that the concerns and goals of that scholarship were very much in place two hundred years ago. The biographical articles includes some of the earliest published information on Mozart, and Griesinger’s Biographische Notizen on Haydn were to come in 1809. They also extend to minor figures (Antonio Lolli, Joseph and Heinrich Gugel, and Christian Friedrich Quandt), and to women (Faustina Hasse, Elisabeth Mara). A few biographical contributions (e.g., on Fux and Buononcini) include partial catalogues of a composer’s works. The historical articles focus on topics as specific as the history of German music from Luther to Emperor Karl VI and choral singing in Bohemian churches in the time of Hus. The theoretical articles discuss both the history of theory and its more recent practice, and include a recommendation for a multi-volume encyclopedia of music theory with multiple contributors. The articles on national music demonstrate interest in the music of countries as far away as the Pacific islands.

With their astonishingly wide range of topics, these articles show that the AmZ’s readership in the early years of the 19th century would have recognized and shared nearly all of the issues and concerns that are currently being discussed in the professional journals of a half-dozen sub-disciplines of musicology.

Benjamin Walton (University of Bristol), Rossini’s bust: The twin styles and the demands of Romantic biography.

In February 1868, the Paris Opéra celebrated the 500th performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. Afterwards, members of the orchestra and chorus gathered under the windows of the composer’s apartment, just as they had at the premiere almost 40 years before. Such repetition underlined the event’s significance as a commemoration for a figure from the distant past, whose brief appearance at his window did nothing to dispel the feeling expressed by one journalist at his funeral the following November: that creatively he had died many years before. Much has been written since about the ‘great renunciation’ of 1829, but my paper will seek to move beyond this as biographical phenomenon to explore Rossini’s historiographical transformation from the romantic embodiment of modern experience in the 1820s to a canonised but rarely played living classic in the 1850s and 1860s. I wish to re-examine the creation of Rossini as the anti-Beethovenian pole of the ‘twin styles’ which, following Kiesewetter, became (and still remains) a key explanatory narrative for the unfolding of nineteenth-century musical history. Furthermore, I will consider how Rossini’s return to France in the 1850s led to the careful re-shaping by his allies of his place within new conceptions of musical history. This involved campaigning against some stereotypes (the composer as frivolous Italian, for instance), and replacing them with others (Rossini as enigmatic genius). Even Rossini’s dwellings in Paris and Passy demonstrate his own self-consciousness about his place within historical developments, their decorations mapping out the musical canon with busts and paintings of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and of Rossini himself. Examination of the composer’s late life thereby sheds intriguing light on the ways in which nineteenth-century reception history interacted with romantic historical expectations to recraft the life of a composer while still living.